Remnants of Enchantment

CAIRO - 10 May 2017: Remnants of Enchantment, currently showing at Gypsum Gallery, is a two-person show of new drawings and oil paintings by Cairo-based artists Doa Aly and Islam Zaher. The artists share a formative experience as students of painting at a state-run fine art school in the 1990s and the works presented in this show track an ongoing artistic exploration of the legacy of fine art traditions in their practice.

In 2007, Aly started a series of sequential pencil drawings based on illustrations of the human skull anatomy, as they appear in the 25th edition of Henry Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body. The series has organically evolved over the last 10 years to reflect the artist’s interest in literature, performance, myth and ritual. Earlier sub-series of her drawings have featured depictions of dancer limbs, Victorian postmortem portraits and excerpts from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a narrative poem that Aly has used as a major source in many of her performances and videos.

Primarily line-based, Aly pushes the fine art tradition of human figuration to its limit. She is adept at controlling pressure, motion and a generative friction between pencil and paper. Her terse, lacelike drawings of repeated patterns are intensely emotive but not expressionistic.

Islam Zaher’s loyalty to the essence of oil paint as an alive, tactile medium lies at the core of his art practice. Obsessed with the expressive potential of color and paint skin, his work, exhibited for the first time at Gypsum, seeks to translate cerebral processes into raw, psychologically charged images. Zaher’s sophisticated palette and his annihilation of form and contour stem out of his expert draftsmanship and innate understanding of the medium of painting.

Exhibition ends May 13.

Gypsum Gallery • 5 Ibrahim Naguib Street, Apt 2, Garden City • Open daily from noon to 8pm, Friday from 4 to 8pm, closed Sunday • info@gypsumgallery.com • www.gypsumgallery.com


Remnants of Enchantment



Remnants of Enchantment


Remnants of Enchantment


Remnants of Enchantment