Medhat Shafik

Medhat Shafik was born in El Badari (Egypt) in 1956. He has lived and worked in Italy since 1976.

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After graduating from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, with a degree in Painting and another in Set Design, in the '80s he began to successfully participate in numerous art exhibitions in Italy and abroad. But his true consecration came in 1995 when he was awarded the Leone d’Oro prize at the Venice Biennale for the best national pavilion.

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Shafik’s works are part of many public and private collections all over the world. The Metropolitan Museum of New York acclaimed him as one of the most interesting artists in the contemporary Arab world. With an ability to combine the suggestions and colours of Eastern art with the most advanced compositional and expressive techniques of the Western avant-garde, Shafik manages to create a very personal and visionary artistic language. However, his world is not an escape from reality but a way to analyse it and express his social commitment in an age of globalisation.

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As a "playwright" artist, he gives life to architectural plots intertwining the dimension of the ego with the cosmic dimension:

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“I collect small pieces of glass from the backwash of the sea; they are residues, flakes of emotions, metaphors of our identity fragments and, like someone about to make a restoration work, I reunite the rubbles giving them new life and dignity," Shafik stated. What our civilization considers waste, an object already consumed, is saved from the sinking of forgetfulness and recovered, with the density of its experience, to acquire a new meaning and write a new story.