Notes

The present lot represents one of Samir Fouad’s repetitively explored themes: the corruption of Egyptian society with the advent of mass commercialization and its impact on Egyptian society and identity. The ubiquity and glamorization of international brands and the impact of foreign imports and capitalist ideas have had on Egyptian society are explored frequently by Fouad to discuss the impact such changes have had on the country from an economic and visual standpoint. The rabid hunger of the subject eating from an empty plate shows the futility of capitalism and globalisation in Egypt. In addition, the signage of international brands has become so tightly integrated into the local visual landscape, from shop signage and large billboards placed repeatedly throughout the city, that it has consumed Egyptians in a manner that is almost literal.

Samir Fouad was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1944. He had shown outstanding talent in painting since early childhood, but he went on to study electronic engineering. While pursuing a successful career in IT, he simultaneously participated in the Egyptian art scene. Fouad had his first one-man show in England in 1970, and the second in Cairo in 1977. In 2001, he left his job to devote himself to art full-time.

Fouad’s art is derived from various streams. Growing up in post-war Heliopolis, a neighbourhood of Cairo that had a population of Egyptians and foreign residents, gave him a cosmopolitan dimension and his continuous search into human existence and the correlation between music and visual arts gives him a distinctive artistic vision. He conveys this vision through the juxtaposition of arrest and movement and the representation of the passing of time in his work. His artistic content is predominantly expressionist, and his visual language draws from the heritage of painting to the horizons of modernism. However, his state of mind and mood is thoroughly Egyptian and he selects the subjects of his paintings that he describes as ‘The culture and soil’ of his motherland.

Since 1997, Fouad has held fifteen one-man shows. He represented Egypt at the International Watercolour Biennale in 2001; the International Luxor Symposium in 2011; held a co-exhibition with Italian artist Franco Rizoli in Venice in 2016; and a major retrospective at Ofok Gallery in Mahmoud Said Museum, Cairo in 2018. His works have been exhibited in various countries such as the USA, UK, Italy, Russia, Kenya, Dubai, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.

Provenance

Heba Elkayal, Cairo, 2023.