When the Hammer Museum announced that Ali Eyal had won the 2025 Mohn Award, the decision felt both inevitable and electric. The biennial prize—awarded in conjunction with the museum’s celebrated Made in LA Biennial—has long been a barometer of the city’s evolving artistic voice. With its $100,000 purse and accompanying monograph, the award recognizes artists whose work not only defines Los Angeles but unsettles it.

Eyal, born in Iraq in 1994 and now based in Los Angeles, is precisely that kind of artist. His paintings shimmer with unease. They seduce before they bruise. And in their layered surfaces, they carry the weight of war, migration, and a childhood shaped as much by geopolitical upheaval as by animated fantasy.

A Biennial That Shapes a city

Since its inception, the Made in LA Biennial has positioned itself as an incubator for underrecognized and emerging artists across Los Angeles. The Mohn Award, presented every two years, is its most coveted honor. Previous winners have often seen their careers accelerate onto national and international stages.

This year, alongside Eyal, the museum recognized interdisciplinary artist Carl Cheng with the Career Achievement Award and portraitist Greg Breda with the Public Recognition Award. Each received $25,000—affirming the biennial’s commitment to artists across generations.

Yet Eyal’s selection resonates with particular urgency. In a city defined by diaspora and reinvention, his paintings feel like emotional cartographies of the immigrant condition.

Painting After War: Memory as Material

Eyal’s biography is inseparable from his practice. Born in Baghdad during a period marked by the US occupation of Iraq, he grew up amid images of rupture—military presence, fractured streets, the hum of instability. But alongside these lived realities were other images: the saturated hues and moral clarity of Disney films, flickering across television screens in darkened rooms.

This dual inheritance—conflict and fantasy—threads through his canvases.

The Theater of Displacement

Eyal’s paintings are often large-scale, immersive environments populated by hybrid figures: part-human, part-animal, part-myth. Limbs elongate into tendrils; faces dissolve into smoky atmospheres. Oil paint is applied in translucent veils, then scratched, smeared, and built up again, creating a skin-like surface that seems perpetually in flux.

In several works presented at the biennial, domestic interiors morph into psychological landscapes. A bedroom tilts precariously; a corridor narrows into darkness. Familiar architectural spaces—symbols of safety—become unstable terrains. The viewer senses both shelter and threat, as if stepping into a memory that refuses to settle.

Andrew Berardini, writing in Artforum, described Eyal’s work as a “sensory whirl of memory and association, imagination and desire, pain and pleasure.” The phrase captures the oscillation at the heart of Eyal’s method. His paintings do not narrate trauma directly. Instead, they stage it as atmosphere—an ambient condition that seeps into every corner of the frame.

Surrealism Reimagined for the 21st Century

Eyal’s imagery inevitably invites comparison to historical surrealism, yet his work feels distinctly contemporary. Where early surrealists mined dreams to escape rationality, Eyal turns to the subconscious as a site of historical residue. His distortions are not whimsical—they are scar tissue.

Color plays a crucial role. Murky violets and bruised blues dominate, punctuated by sudden flares of acidic green or incandescent orange. These chromatic shocks evoke both cartoon exuberance and the glare of explosions. The tension between seduction and violence animates the entire composition.

His figures rarely appear whole. Bodies fragment or merge, suggesting the instability of identity in exile. The immigrant experience emerges not as a sociological concept but as a corporeal sensation: stretched, split, perpetually reassembled.

Los Angeles as Psychic Landscape

Though shaped by Iraq, Eyal’s work is equally rooted in Los Angeles. The city’s sprawl, its filmic illusions, its layered immigrant histories—all filter into his visual vocabulary. In interviews, he has spoken about the porous boundary between personal memory and mediated image. In Los Angeles, that boundary feels especially thin.

Hammer Museum director Zoë Ryan praised Eyal’s “complex and richly detailed painting,” noting its power in addressing war, globalism, and the immigrant experience in the United States. Her observation underscores the way Eyal transforms autobiography into a broader meditation on displacement in the 21st century.

Los Angeles becomes, in his hands, less a geographic site than a psychological one—a place where narratives collide and identities are continuously rewritten.

The Weight and Promise of the Mohn Award

Winning the Mohn Award brings more than financial support. The forthcoming catalogue, to be published after the biennial’s March 1 close, will formalize Eyal’s trajectory in print—a tangible archive of a practice deeply concerned with memory’s fragility.

At 31, Eyal stands at a pivotal moment. The recognition affirms his position within the city’s cultural fabric while projecting his work onto a wider stage. Yet what makes the award compelling is not its prestige, but its alignment with the spirit of his paintings: attentive, vulnerable, unafraid of complexity.

A Painter Paying Attention

Eyal’s canvases feel as though they are listening—to history, to inherited trauma, to the flicker of childhood fantasy. They ask viewers to slow down, to inhabit ambiguity, to acknowledge that beauty and devastation often occupy the same frame.

In honoring Ali Eyal, the Hammer Museum has recognized more than a singular talent. It has spotlighted a mode of painting attuned to the fractures of our time—restless, luminous, and unflinchingly human.

As the echoes of war and animation continue to intermingle across his surfaces, Eyal reminds us that memory is neither fixed nor passive. It is a living, shifting terrain. And in his hands, it becomes art that refuses to look away.