The preliminary breakthroughs of the so-called Eighties Generation are evident in Risan’s earliest output. In Mythologies of Iraq (1992), a series of paintings shown in a solo exhibition at the National Museum in Baghdad, talismans, ancient script, and Sumerian-inspired characters are brought together against riotous backgrounds. The artist’s works of this period are governed by the type of “free imagination” that is associated with the painter Paul Klee, whom he greatly admired at the time: subjectivity through automatism. Baghdad Festival (1988), for example, contains an animated cast of goddesses, devils, and three-headed creatures parading through a sunlit scene. As Risan’s mustard palette changes with subtle tonal differences throughout the picture, fluctuating light seems to possess movement, adding to the rhythms of his figures. A cuneiform tablet occupies the right side of the composition while Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is depicted on its opposite end, alluding to the evolution of science, art, and communication over millennia. Vigorous brushstrokes appear to consume a bald figure in a yellow inferno in the lower corner of the painting; and in the middle ground a wiry faun rides a bicycle in the direction of a statue-like image of a queen. Risan’s source materials are evident, spanning centuries and cultures, yet the combined meaning of his signs remains unclear. Over time, his cryptic symbols were flooded by torrential backgrounds; as figures disappeared, contaminated landscapes remained. Steadily shifting to abstraction, Risan and his colleagues traversed the shadows of disaster that accompanied the fall of their city amidst the desolation of sanctions, and later with the onset of the occupation.