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Azad Art Gallery, 4 Mohamed Anees Street , Elzamlek, Cairo (2026)

19/05/2026

Azad Sculpture Symposium| Silver Sands, North Coast
In collaboration with

Mohamed Radwan, one of Egypt’s most prominent contemporary sculptors … joins the first Azad Sculpture Symposium at Silver Sands, North Coast, presented in collaboration with ORA.

Currently working on his monumental sculpture The Kiss, Radwan brings to the symposium a sculptural language shaped by strength, sensitivity, and timeless human expression. His presence marks a significant addition to this gathering, reflecting the caliber and vision at the heart of the symposium.

18/05/2026

Ali Alsheikh (b. 1981) is a passionate and experienced Art Director and artist with a proven track record of successfully leading art direction for projects. With 20 years of experience as a professional artist and interior designer, Ali brings a wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm to his work. Ali is dedicated to generating and adapting equipment and technologies to serve user needs, particularly in the field of art and theatre scenography. He is also the founder and director of the Professional Symposium of Sand Sculpture in Syria since 2015.

Ali holds a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Visual Arts Centre in Lattakia, Syria, which he obtained in 2004. His memberships include being a member of the Syndicate of Cinema Technicians in Lebanon, undergoing training as a member of the Syrian Plastic Artists Union, and serving as a member of the arts committee at the Monodrama Theatre Festival in Syria. Additionally, Ali works as an art consultant at the RiserHub Consultancy and Training Center in both Syria and Lebanon.

Ali El-Sheikh’s latest project “Diving” is an artistic journey that symbolizes his deep connection with the sea and humanity. Through this project, he explores the diver’s complex persona, expressing unity with nature and the sea’s profound impact on life. The incorporation of diving and masks into portraiture adds layers of symbolism, courage, and mystery, enriching the art form. Ali’s vision revolves around depicting the diver’s spiritual and existential connection with the sea, portraying the constant search for self and integration with reality amidst the vastness of nature.

14/05/2026

Azad Gallery, in collaboration with ORA Developers, is pleased to present the first Sculpture Symposium at the North Coast , bringing together artists from across the region and beyond in a live, site-responsive artistic experience.

Participating artists:
Mohamed Radwan (Egypt)
Jamal A. Rahim (Bahrain)
Nabil Helou (Lebanon)
Dravko Zdravkov (Bulgaria)
Curated by Islam Ibada ( Egypt’s )

Conceived as an open dialogue between sculpture, landscape, and public space, the symposium reflects a shared commitment to creating lasting cultural encounters through contemporary art.

10/05/2026

Norhan Khorshed
Untitled, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
130 x 90 cm

Norhan Khorshed (b. 1995, Egypt) is an Egyptian expressionist painter whose practice examines the body as a site of emotional tension and psychological exposure. A graduate of the Faculty of Applied Arts, Helwan University (Decorative Arts, 2019), Khorshid translates complex inner states into fluid visual environments that blur the boundaries between perception and reality.

Her paintings center on unstable, shifting figures bodies that appear suspended between presence and dissolution. Rather than fixed identities, these forms suggest psychological flux: vulnerability, alienation, tenderness, and quiet resistance. The human figure becomes less a subject than a vessel through which emotional states are made visible.

Khorshid situates her characters within ambiguous, dreamlike spaces. Color moves in soft yet charged transitions, dissolving structural certainty and amplifying emotional depth.

Distortion and softness operate not as stylistic effects, but as language mechanisms through which fragility and instability are articulated. Surrounding elements function as extensions of the body’s interior condition, carrying tension without overt narrative.

Her work resists clarity in favor of sensation. The figures inhabit a threshold between intimacy and isolation, where exposure is neither theatrical nor decorative, but deeply human. In this suspended space, vulnerability becomes central not as weakness, but as a state of truth.

Khorshid has participated in exhibitions across Egypt and the Arab world and has received recognition including the Youth Salon Award for Drawing and First Prize at the Talae‘ competition.

Through expressive fluidity and psychological nuance, Khorshid positions painting as a space where the human condition is not defined, but felt where the body becomes the terrain upon which emotion is quietly revealed.

09/05/2026

Featured Artwork | Hakeem AbouKila

Hakeem AbouKila (b. 1989, Alexandria) is an Egyptian contemporary artist whose practice interrogates power, restriction, and collective consciousness through densely layered compositions and aerial urban perspectives. Working across painting, printmaking, and installation, Abou-Kila constructs visual systems that merge myth, politics, inherited culture, and speculative imagination.

A graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Alexandria University (Printmaking Division), his training in graphic structure remains visible in the architectural clarity and intricate layering of his surfaces.

Cityscapes frequently appear from elevated viewpoints compressed, mapped, and stratified—operating as metaphors for surveillance, exclusion, and the invisible boundaries that govern contemporary societies.

These spatial strategies are not documentary; they function as critical cartographies of chaos, ideology, and control.
Abou-Kila draws from mythology, religious symbolism, and historical memory, interweaving them with current political and social realities across the Middle East and Africa. His works balance satire with seriousness: irony becomes a device for exposing systemic disorder, while symbolic density reflects the complexity of collective identity.

Even when addressing conflict or restriction, his compositions retain a rhythmic visual coherence suggesting that fragmentation itself can be structured.

Rather than privileging purely personal narratives, Abou-Kila situates the individual within broader global frameworks. For him, honest art must operate in parallel with time engaging the past, interrogating the present, and speculating on possible futures. Recurring gestures of tenderness or romantic symbolism appear within his works not as sentiment, but as propositions for alternative futures shaped by awareness and connection.

07/05/2026

Alaa Ayman (b. 1995, Cairo) is a painter and video artist whose practice investigates memory as a constructed image rather than a fixed document. Working primarily in oil, she develops layered compositions through processes of addition, erasure, and blurring, allowing figures and spaces to oscillate between presence and disappearance.

A graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts (2018), she further pursued studies in Visual Arts at Studio Khana for Contemporary Art and Cultural Development in Cairo. This dual formation informs a practice grounded in painterly experimentation and conceptual inquiry.
Central to Ayman’s work is her engagement with personal archives and found materials old photographs, letters, tapes, and negatives which she collects and reinterprets.

Drawn to the tonal qualities of vintage film, amateur lighting, and informal gestures, she reconstructs fragments of memory into newly imagined narratives. Her paintings do not attempt to preserve the past; instead, they recompose it, weaving personal mythology with broader historical and collective memory.

Human relationships remain at the core of her inquiry. Through attentive observation and intimate storytelling, Ayman transforms everyday moments into suspended, atmospheric scenes where identity feels both familiar and elusive.

By treating the painted surface as a site of accumulation and revision, Ayman positions memory as fluid constantly rewritten through gesture, pigment, and time.

06/05/2026

Featured Artworks | Wadhah Mahdi

Wadhah Mahdi (b. 1974, Iraq) is an Iraqi painter whose figurative practice navigates the intersection of memory, intimacy, and quiet resilience.

Trained at Baghdad’s Institute and College of Fine Arts, Mahdi left Iraq in 2005, yet his work continues to draw deeply from the cultural and emotional fabric of his homeland.
His paintings are characterized by warm, saturated palettes and carefully composed scenes that hover between realism and symbolism.

Female figures often depicted with childlike softness occupy intimate, interior spaces. These figures do not dramatize experience; rather, they inhabit it quietly.

Their presence is marked by stillness, shared warmth, and subtle gestures that suggest both connection and solitude.
Mahdi’s work frequently balances chromatic joy with emotional undertones of melancholy.

The brightness of rose, red, and earthen tones coexists with muted grays and browns, creating a tension between vitality and nostalgia. This coexistence defines the emotional register of his paintings: moments of tenderness layered with traces of loss.
Everyday acts holding fruit, sewing, sitting together become symbolic without losing their simplicity.

In works where young girls share slices of watermelon, innocence is framed not as naïveté but as a fragile state of awareness. In scenes where a sewing machine anchors the composition, labor and contemplation intersect; domestic ritual becomes a metaphor for continuity and survival.

Mahdi often employs elevated or softened perspectives, introducing a quiet observational distance that enhances the viewer’s sense of witnessing rather than intruding.

05/05/2026

Mostafa Sleem (b. 1981, Egypt) is an Egyptian painter whose practice centers on the human figure as a site of endurance, intimacy, and collective memory. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, Sleem constructs dense, rhythmic compositions in which everyday gestures become carriers of existential weight.

Across his oeuvre, figures occupy the foreground of visual inquiry—not as portraits of specific individuals, but as embodiments of shared experience. Fishermen at the shore, women washing clothes, men seated in cafés, families walking in quiet cohesion: these recurring subjects form a continuum of lived presence. Through earth-toned palettes and layered brushwork, Sleem transforms ordinary acts into meditations on continuity and dignity.

In his recent body of work, Those Who Remain, he extends this inquiry beyond remembrance toward persistence. The figures are not rendered as memory, but as witnesses to survival. Faces often dissolve into anonymity, yet their physicality is unmistakable; they inhabit space with gravity, moving through familiar environments marked by labor, waiting, gathering, and return. The paintings operate as woven surfaces—each canvas contributing to a larger image of collective endurance.

Sleem’s sustained engagement with figuration is informed by decades of visual production, including illustration and art education, where he explored the communicative power of image. His works have been presented in major exhibitions in Egypt and internationally, including NordArt (Germany), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Pennsylvania, and multiple editions of Art Cairo. His paintings are held in public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo.

Through repetition, gesture, and chromatic density, Sleem situates the everyday as a space of quiet resilience—where the act of remaining becomes an affirmation of life itself.

02/05/2026

Featured Artwork | Amjad Al Tayyar
أنتظار, 2025
Mixed media on canvas
129.5 x 94.5 cm

Amjad Altayyar is an Iraqi-born artist whose practice explores solitude as a psychological and symbolic condition.

Trained at the University of Baghdad (BFA, 1996) and later completing postgraduate studies in Fine Arts and Education in Europe, Altayyar’s work reflects a life shaped between geographies where memory, migration, and introspection quietly intersect.
Central to his visual language are soft-featured figures often children or young adolescents whose wide-set eyes carry a depth of interior contemplation.

These figures do not confront the viewer; rather, they inhabit states of inward absorption. Their presence generates a subtle tension between vulnerability and awareness, inviting empathy without sentimentality.

Recurring objects birds, dolls, flowers, apples, domestic vessels function as symbolic companions. They are not decorative elements, but extensions of the figures’ inner worlds. Through these poetic associations, Altayyar constructs scenes of gentle union between human and object, suggesting identification, protection, or quiet dialogue. The intimacy of these pairings transforms stillness into narrative.

His restrained palette marked by tonal economy and chromatic austerity reinforces the contemplative atmosphere of the work. Color operates sparingly, structuring space without spectacle. The compositions appear suspended in a quiet ritual, where melancholy is present yet weightless an understated sadness that hovers rather than settles.

Altayyar has presented solo exhibitions in Iraq, Sweden, and Bahrain, and has participated in international exhibitions since the early 1990s. His works are included in permanent collections within Swedish municipal and regional institutions, including Norrköping, Örebro, Katrineholm, and the Östergötland and Södermanland regional councils.

Through quiet figuration and symbolic reduction, Altayyar positions innocence not as naivety, but as a lens one through which isolation, tenderness, and the fragile architecture of belonging are made visible.

30/04/2026

Taha El korany
From the Market Series

El Korany’s work foregrounds the collective as subject.
Figures are organized within shared acts of labor, gathering, and routine, forming a continuous visual rhythm.

The elevated viewpoint flattens hierarchy and reduces individual distinction, emphasizing structure over narrative.
The market is constructed as a system of movement and coexistence rather than a site of exchange.

Referred to by the artist as “Salt of the Earth”,
these figures articulate the essential, sustaining presence of everyday life.

طه القرني
من سلسلة السوق

تتمحور أعمال طه القرني حول الجماعة بوصفها موضوعًا بصريًا.
تنتظم الشخصيات داخل أفعال مشتركة من العمل والتجمّع والروتين، لتشكّل إيقاعًا بصريًا مستمرًا.

يؤدي المنظور العلوي إلى تهميش الفردية لصالح البنية، حيث تتقدّم العلاقات والتكوين على السرد.
ويُعاد تقديم السوق كنظام من الحركة والتجاور، لا كمكان للتبادل.

هؤلاء الذي يسميهم طه بـ«ملح الأرض»…
هو هذا الحضور الإنساني الجوهري الذي يشكّل نسيج الحياة اليومية.

25/04/2026

Featured Artworks | Mohamed Radwan

Mohamed Radwan (b. 1970, Cairo) is an Egyptian sculptor whose practice explores the spatial and structural possibilities of abstraction through iron and bronze. Working with geometric reduction and disciplined formal language, Radwan constructs sculptural forms that negotiate balance, tension, and continuity within space.

A graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University, where he later obtained both his Master’s degree (2000) and PhD (2006) in sculpture, Radwan’s academic formation informs his rigorous approach to material and form. His works are not conceived as objects alone, but as spatial propositions lines extended into volume, voids activated as much as mass.

Characterized by controlled geometry and refined surfaces, his sculptures investigate the relationship between weight and lightness, solidity and openness. Iron and bronze, traditionally associated with permanence and monumentality, are articulated in ways that suggest movement and visual permeability. Through this reduction of form, Radwan invites direct physical and perceptual engagement, allowing the viewer to navigate the work rather than merely observe it.

Alongside his studio practice, Radwan serves as Assistant Professor and Head of the Sculpture Department at Helwan University, contributing to the development of contemporary sculptural discourse in Egypt. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions and international sculpture symposiums, including Changchun (China), Morges (Switzerland), and Nanto Petra (Italy), situating his practice within a global sculptural context.

Recipient of Egypt’s State Prize for Artistic Creativity, Radwan continues to refine a sculptural language grounded in structural clarity and spatial dialogue positioning abstraction not as detachment from reality, but as a disciplined inquiry into its underlying form.

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