Adel El Siwi

Egyptian painter Adel El-Siwi was born in Beheira Egypt in 1952. Between 1970-1976 he studied medicine at Cairo University before seriously considering a career as a painter. Like other Egyptian artists of the late 1970s, El Siwi, who had emigrated to Europe and North America, was compelled to return to the motherland, drawn by the power of Egypt's legacy of art aesthetic achievement. In 1980 he moved to Milan only to return to Cairo in 1990 where he currently lives and works.

After twelve years of self-training and traveling Europe and Egypt he had his first major show in 1985 at the Cairo Atelier. Since the 1980s he has had solo exhibitions in Egypt, Germany, Lebanon and Italy. He has participated in group exhibitions as far across the globe as Brazil and Mexico. A 1988's exhibition at the Mashrabia Gallery in Cairo marked El Siwi's transition from the human figure to the interiorscape. This new phase attempted to give the traditional still life object pride and powerful presence. His latest works have been more narrative and ironic. Pure colors pierce the tonal elements, but are restrained by the somber Egyptian landscape marked by the monochromes of the desert and the grayness of Cairo. El-Siwi chooses to use the trite, simple themes of flower pots, palm trees, camels, etc. For considerable time, El Siwi strongly believed that the more limited the means the stronger the potential of the expression. Hence, he refused to use any other medium of painting than painting on paper or canvas. However, in his most recent work in the 1997's Venice Biennale's exhibition Modernities & Memories: Recent Works from the Islamic World, a room installation entitled The Face and Beyond, El Siwi explores the new genre of conceptual art through painting.

In this work he acknowledges his past, as a cycle of repetition always returns to its starting point. He also acknowledges the presence of the collective in the individual, attempting to blur the boundaries between the two. The individual, therefore, becomes the vibrating beginning from which the collective reverberates. The Face and Beyond also attempts to discover the duality of the individual. Heavy and sad faces are juxtaposed with smirking, grinning faces in an attempt to release them from the weight of overbearing realities. This exploration in discovery and rediscovery sets El-Siwi apart from other painters in Egypt and the region.

El-Siwi has translated Leonard da Vinci's Treatise on Painting into Arabic. He has worked as a film art-director, written about contemporary art, and experimented with virtual work projection on buildings. Since 1996 he has been involved in a community arts project in Old Cairo. El-Siwi has been an initiator and participant in the experimental community arts project in Kom Ghorab, Cairo, Egypt (1996); Projections of work on historical building, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1996). Disillusioned by the corruption of thirty years of state-controlled society, El-Siwi has chosen to remain on the peripheral of the art establishment. It is precisely this position that has earned him success and popularity amongst supporters of a counterculture. El-Siwi's challenge of the system that grants greater worth to physicians than painters also attracted many admirers.

Bibliographies/Artists:

Karnouk, Liliane. Contemporary Egyptian Art. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo Press, 1995

Modernities & Memories: Recent Works from the Islamic World. New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1997.