|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
A M R E H E I B A Home Biography ►Works Articles News Contact |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I approach a blank canvas with anticipation and without any preconceived ideas. A story slowly unfolds and a dialogue is opened between the various elements. I draw my inspiration from various sources: magazines and newspaper images, my studio tools, my household objects, toys, paintings that I admire, as well as images in my imagination. In my latest series of paintings, I intently wanted to give more emphasis to the brushwork and less to the graphical aspect of my work. I limited my palette and worked more with shapes and lines. I also experimented with layering the figures on the canvas and utilizing the multiple layers as a tool to input a time element. While most of the figures and icons in this series remain the same as the last five years or so of my work, new elements found heir way into my canvas. While my work is mostly related to my personal experiences, some global events could not have been omitted.
Artist Statement Paris 2008
Amre Heiba, like Kenawy, shares a love for the surreal and the magical but in paintings and lithographs. Time and location are lost in Heiba's paintings. Nostalgia governs the layers of negative space juxtaposed with the shadow of a man, the up close of a kiss, a fragment of shower curtains, the stand still of a clock and the abandonment of a doll. He carries romanticized longings for innate desires. A draughtsman, he spends his time in his studio out on a farm in the Arab/Greco-Roman Mediterranean city of Alexandria. A city known to have set the stage for many writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Adhaf Souief as modern and contemporary contributors to romantic Arabic novels and fictions, Heiba redefined his memory of a beloved Alexandria and turns his surfaces into diaries. He sketches his memories and writes poetry, lyrics, or ballads that continue his desires for the unattainable. His scripts are in English and not of the native language, once again reaching out to a wider collective.
In the works of the artists mentioned, there have appeared continuous notions of the following traits; the choice of representing popular imagery alongside culturally specific symbols that have been recycled to fit the needs of the artist as well as the contemporary viewer. Such depictions include the presence of super hero's, ancient Egyptian gods and supermodels, dolls, hawks, Bedouins and national diva's, all projected as works of art produced by local Egyptian artists dialoguing in Latin script a chain of alphabets that can also be read globally. The question of time, space and location are no longer the issue, but cultural definitions are being recycled to help adopt the habits of a digital age with a raging media.
Aida Eltorie Art Critic, Cairo, New York Breaking News: Paris 2008
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
.: Copyright ©
Amre Heiba 2008 - Designed and development by Moataz El Safty |
:. Last Update
Tuesday, March 15, 2011 :.