PLACES…
Familiar Places; there are some that have lost their familiarity and have become unrecognizable. When people attend the scene in silence, the unfamiliar seems even stranger than before. When One imagines a whole scene of what is an uninhabited city in complete stillness, such will lose its warmth, familiarity, and intimacy. Thus, such places in our imaginations, have become locations of silence and absence.
Shaker Abdulhamid – Art and Strangeness
Places often have their own context, their own inner energy, inducing excessively deeper memories. Such is not meant to be captured, but rather the yearning to search for the familiar or usual in a memorably common scene, or in another thought; is the dismantling of reality so the scene thus becomes more alienated, isolated and lonely.
Sami Aboul Azm
Sami Aboul Azm was born in 1967 in Egypt, he studied at the Faculty of Art Education and received his PhD in 2008 on Global Contemporary realism Art movements. He began his career by collaborating in Youth Salons and National Exhibitions and later became a well-known and established artist. He was distinguished by his distinctive realistic style, especially with Figurative Art which is mixed with philosophic and glimmering subject matters.
The Art of Aboul Azm incorporates Figurative Art, Still Life and Landscape unlikely outside the control of the shape, and emphasizes on moral presence, respecting the meanings behind the appearance of the unrealistic. The concepts of Light and Time constantly play a major role in his works. Light being a main instrument in the depiction of scenes, and Time being the waiting status of the figures. Both concepts executed around themes of alienation and isolation, with use of lesser complicating colours.
The art of Aboul Azm often delves into issues that deal with political or social hiding behind the forms that are carefully selected to become the symbols of thought and meditation that are much needed to the person viewing the art.
Aboul Azm participated in numerous exhibitions both in Egypt (at Al Masar Gallery since 2009) and abroad, not to mention his acquisitions at the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art. Aboul Azm is currently working as an Art Professor at the Faculty of Art in Cairo. Al Masar gallery is the Artist’s sole gallery since 2008.
Places, Sami Aboul Azm
Location: Al Masar Gallery, Cairo
Duration: 25 December 2022 – 23 February 2023