ROME — When Paolo Pellegrin’s gripping photographs of the 2016 battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul were hung along the entrance wall of Gallery 5 of the Maxxi, Italy’s national museum for contemporary art and architecture, handouts labeled the work a “contemporary ‘Guernica,’ ” referring to the masterpiece by Picasso.
Like “Guernica,” Mr. Pellegrin’s patchwork of images, challenges the viewer with an unflinching frontal assault depicting the totality of warfare, spanning the battlefield, civilian populations in flight and the strained post-fight confrontations between victors and vanquished. In one of the oversize images, smoke from the burning oil fields of Qayyara, southeast of Mosul, is the protagonist: an abstract, terrible beauty.
