Ibrahim El Dessouki

Ibrahim El Dessouki (b. 1969, Cairo, Egypt) lives and works in Cairo as a painter of a highly condensed style in portraiture as well as in still life painting and landscape. His unique elaborate and highly meticulous treatment of shades & his refined textures that echo his feelings through an extraordinary & notable use of paint kneaded carefully to result in simultaneously dreamy & epic tones of color.  Not to mention his immense sized shapes of women who pose at times to inspire awe and bewilderment showing off in the meantime details and mutations of degrees-of dimness, shades and light, to evoke the sense of tenderness and delicacy out of so many thick layers of rich and varied tints of paint which make the painting so vital and poetic.

Dessouki paints animals, still nature, landscape & women all in a soft, incredible & divine contemporary style. He is famous for his paintings of women; some of those paintings express his nostalgia for the women who strolled in his neighborhood when he was a child with their ample bodies hardly covered with a graceful shawl. His paintings of women are simple yet rich with grace and softness; his style is as pleasing to the eye and elegant as his subject matters.

Dessouki participated in exhibitions in Egypt and abroad. In 2003, he was part of the Panorama of 20^th Century Egyptian Art in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria. In 2006 & 2008, he was an invited artist to the 10^th and 11^th Cairo International Biennale.

Artist Statement:

“Art, being it poetry, visual arts, drama or dance, is the transformation of what is real into magic, and converting what is magical into a tangible reality, for we perceive that there are beyond those infantile voices, the primordial voices. And we guess the being of those most archaic voices, most deeper, and most sagacious that spoke the legend language, and feel them as not mere legend, but as simultaneously dreams and symbols.

Art, is essentially that dream, and that puzzlement which as presented by one of us; squeezing and drenching out his very soul, is squeezing indeed all out souls, while imposing on himself, so as to accomplish that feat, that primordial image; the sphinx’s image; the riddle and the dream that doesn’t spare a minute without drowning us in the realm of dream; and does not stop one moment without undermining our being with the most terrible riddles, beguiling us by showing to our eyes the most terrible question marks, showing them before our eyes, and before our free souls, as they strive to free themselves from the claws of the Animal, which is crouching inside our body, that vicious jail.”

Ibrahim El Dessouki