Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Steve Mumford. This will be Mumford’s fifth exhibition at Postmasters presenting two distinct groups of paintings: large scale heroic figurative ones and grafitti based text works.

In his new paintings Mumford continues to investigate the war in Iraq, based on his experiences there and the understanding he gleaned from civilians and combatants. Sometimes from the perspective of the American soldiers, sometimes from the insurgents’ point of view, these paintings explore peoples’ motivations in war, the ties that bind as well as fracture.

Iraqi prostitutes at a Western hotel; rifts between foreign jihadis and Iraqi nationalists; tender farewells of a suicide bomber; languid afternoons of a US platoon; Koranic exhortations to jihad; the mythos and the reality of American military power: all these are facets in Mumford’s version of the hard, glittering stone of war.

Mumford has made 6 trips to Iraq between 2003 and 2008, emailing his drawings to artnet.com as a visual record of his experiences, and subsequently exhibiting them in numerous shows worldwide.

He published many of the drawings in Baghdad Journal, An Artist in Occupied Iraq, Drawn & Quarterly, 2005. A selection of his drawings is included in The Storyteller, an exhibition curated by Claire Glman and Margaret Sundell for ICI now on view at the Art Gallery of Parsons The New School for Design in New York.