Medhat Shafik

Milan

Corso Venezia 29, 20121 Milan, MI

Tuesday – Friday, 11am – 1pm / 3pm – 7pm

Saturday 11am – 7pm

For any info:

+39 347 285 9608

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Medhat Shafik Bio

MARCOROSSI artecontemporanea is pleased to present in Milan, and simultaneously in Turin and Verona, a new exhibition by Medhat Shafik entitled Sahara. The artist, of Egyptian origin, is back to show his work in the galleries after a six-year hiatus; his new works centre around the imagery of the desert, an allegory of the globalised world and the fragility of modern man, increasingly removed from his roots and his memories. Like the researchers and archaeologists who continue to dig under the sands of the Sahara and bring to light new remains of Ancient Egypt and other lost civilisations of the African desert, globalised humans metaphorically plough up the dust that covers the foundations of their civilisation to address the challenges of our times. 

The exhibition comprises more than fifty works on canvas and paper on canvas as well as three big sculptural panels on handmade cotton paper, underlining the complex stratification of civilisations and colour as an essential element of life.
Shafik’s artistic practice continues to sway back and forth between intense expression and spiritual reflection. In his new works, the artist counterbalances aspects of a bold material and expressive matrix with oriental influences and with a more meditative dimension in which space is dilated to the point of rarefaction. 

Medhat Shafik is a citizen of the world, a cultural nomad whose travels – both concrete and metaphorical – satisfy his desire for knowledge and discovery of all that which is other and elsewhere, without denying the values and power of his own roots and his own land of origin, Egypt. “Sahara” pays tribute to the biggest desert on Earth, a physically and visually overwhelming space that can overpower us and drive us further, toward the sacred and the metaphysical.
“The title ‘Sahara’,” says Medhat Shafik, “stands for all the world’s deserts, and the desert becomes a metaphor, a container for stories and meanings, as is often the case in my work. For in the desert, everything is reset; man finds himself alone with his own fragility, facing the abyss of the world, as in the famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich that became the manifesto of Romanticism”.