SHAFIK

Visual Artist

Medhat Shafik was born in El Badari in Egypt in 1956. Since 1976 he has lived and worked in Italy. 

Indicated by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, in the essay Egyptian Modern Art by Salwa Mikdadi, as one of the most interesting artists of the Arab world of the latest generations, Medhat Shafik combines the suggestions, colors and original traits of oriental culture with the artistic languages ​​of the avant-garde Westerners.

Graduated in painting and scenography at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, from the beginning he was characterized by a sort of voracity and enthusiasm when faced with the languages ​​of the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century which he felt were similar to his world. 

Since the early 1980s he has successfully participated in many Italian and international art exhibitions and his style has some distinctive features: a dense expressive charge, physical and material, which alternates with a more meditative and spiritual dimension, in which the space of work expands and tends towards rarefaction.

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An idea of ​​a work of art in which the narration of the self, of one's memories, becomes part of the great journey of humanity. Furthermore, the need to integrate painting with materials recovered from experience, in a collage that becomes a metaphor for the stratifications of history. Finally, the concept of Agora, understood as a place of exchange of things and ideas, at the origin of civilization and democracy. In the interminable search for himself, for his own personal archaeology, through the history of Egypt, Shafik ends up telling the story of all humanity, returning a universal message of tolerance and mutual understanding. These ingredients earned him the Golden Lion of Nations at the 1995 Venice Biennale, of which he was the protagonist together with two compatriots, and other important awards.

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