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Shafik

Shafik is a contemporary visual artist based in Milan. 

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Shafik

Shafik was born in El Badari, Egypt in 1956. He has been living and working in Italy since 1976. He graduated in Painting and Set. 

Described as one of the most interesting artists of the Arab world in recent generations by New York’s Metropolitan Museum in Salwa Mikdadi’s essay Egyptian Modern Art, Shafik combines the evocations, colours and lines of oriental culture with the artistic vocabulary of the Western avant-garde movements. After graduating from the fine arts academy of Brera with a diploma in painting and set design, his career was characterised right from the start by a sort of voracity, of enthusiasm for the idioms of the historic twentieth-century avant-garde, with which he felt an affinity.  

In the early ’eighties he began participating with success in numerous art exhibitions in Italy and abroad, and his style began to be characterised by a number of distinctive traits. First of all, a dense expressive, physical and material charge, alternates with a more meditative, spiritual dimension in which the space of the work is dilated and tends toward rarefaction.  

In his idea of the work of art, the narration of one’s identity and memories becomes a part of the great march of humanity, while the need to integrate painting with materials reclaimed from everyday life becomes part of a collage representing a metaphor for the stratification of history. Lastly, his works reflect the concept of Agorà, defined as a place of trade, for both things and ideas, giving origin to civilisation and democracy. 

In his interminable search for himself and for his own personal archaeology, Shafik begins with Egyptian history and ends up telling the story of all of humanity, offering a universal message of reciprocal tolerance and comprehension. These ingredients won him a Golden Lion of the Nations at the 1995 Biennale di Venezia, where his work was shown alongside that of two other Egyptian artists, as well as other prestigious awards.

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