Galila Nawar| Syra Arts

Biography Exhibitions Press

My interest in portraiture lies in the tension between the latent and the manifest; on the one hand the persona that is presented in a pose or captured snapshot, and on another hand the real person behind it… I choose to paint from selected photographs that allow me to see beyond the pose and create a narrative of my own. Through a detail of a look or a posture, I attempt to find a universal human emotion or a drama specific to a particular time or context. People are what the world is about. Painting them is my way of trying to understand the world we live in.”

Personal Data

Born in Cairo, to a family of filmmakers in1962, the artist continues to live and work in Cairo.

Education

1985 BA in Psychology AUC, Cairo, Egypt.

2000-2004 Drawing and painting course at Magd El Sigini’s studio

2004-2008 Oil Painting and Portraiture at Central St. Martin’s College of

Art. London, UK.

2010 “Photo Album”

Solo Exhibition

Karim Francis Gallery – Cairo, Egypt.

2016 "Debunking Orientalism"

Group Exhibition

Syra Arts - New York - New York

EGYPT NEWS - Photo album: A homage to the past in Egypt

www.news.egypt.com

EGYPT NEWS

THURSDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2010

Photo album: A homage to the past in Egypt

For as long as I can remember, I was painting,” says artist Galila Nawar, whose work “Photo Album” is currently on exhibit at the Karim Francis contemporary art gallery, in the Borsa area of downtown Cairo, according to Egypt's daily newspaper al-masry al youm

A gripping nostalgia is evoked by Nawar's paintings, each an emotionally-distorted adaptation on canvas of old family pictures dating from the 1930s to the 1960s.  “A few years ago my father and grandmother passed away […] the only thing I was left with were boxes of old, sepia family pictures, which moved me beyond reason,” explains Nawar.  Originally a TV and film producer, Nawar decided to study painting and drawing at Maged el-Segini’s studio starting in 2001. In 2004 she enrolled in open courses in portraiture and oil painting at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.  “Photo Album,” her first exhibition, is a homage to characters immortalized in instantaneous snapshots, some posing awkwardly in front of the camera, others confident and smiling. Her washed, sepia portraits bear the appearance of old photographs unable to resist the repeated assaults of time and light.  “I was trained to paint real-life portraits, but when I started working on this series two years ago I deeply appreciated the distant feel of the picture, which allowed me to contemplate my emotions instead of rushing to snatch the moment,” says Nawar.  Her first painting in the “Photo Album” series, titled “Boy Alone,” depicts a young boy in short pants standing directly in front of a camera, both arms quietly resting alongside his body. The artist explains that the figure is her father. She has painted him on nearly every canvas in the exhibition.  The ochre, gray and light green Nawar uses in her paintings are the result of mixing together primary colors. Moving on to "Lilac,” a painting representing her grandmother, Nawar says that she used a light purple for her subject's dress because “it was my grandma’s favourite color, and I picture her with this lilac dress on."  In the painting, Nawar's grandmother stands in front of the photographer, smiling confidently while the pleats of her dress are softly moved by the sea breeze in Alexandria. “What convinced me to paint this picture [...] is the little handkerchief she holds in her left hand [which] reminded me so much of her,” says the artist with a vanishing smile.  Through her delicate paintings, Nawar brings back to life volatile moments of happiness and insouciance. “The Swimmer” represents her father just returning from a swim. She paints him as a young, good-looking man in a swimsuit who poses in front of the camera with a mix of boldness and vulnerability.  “The traces of dripping paint on my artwork reinforce time's distortion of memory,” Nawar says. She also deliberately decided not to finish any of the paintings, in order to convey an acute feel of passing time and vanishing memories.  In “Self-portrait,” Nawar shows just the sketch of a little girl in diapers with a concerned look on her face. The blurred contors of the young girl are brushed in a soft ochre paint. “This self-portrait epitomizes the loss of innocence,” she says.  In the piece "Buddies" nearby, a joyous band of three boys are shown crouching in the grass. The young boys are dressed in short pants and white shirts, and they sport high socks which cover their thin calves. We can instantly imagine these boys with their plump, rosy cheeks and high-pitched laughs, constantly teasing each other.  When asked about her ongoing work, the artist explains that she has not decided which of two topics--the city of Alexandria, or women--will draw her attention next. “When I was a child I used to go to my grandmother’s house for six months of every year, and I am strongly attached to these memories,” she says, "although it may be time to say goodbye to the past.”  The exhibition runs until March 31 at Karim Francis Gallery  1 el-Sherifein Street, 2nd floor, Downtown, Cairo Saturday through Thursday 1-8 PM +202 2391 6357

Contemporary Practices

Cairo-based oil painter Galila Nawar is one somewhat haunted by a past. Her finely-layered, almost white- washed-looking portraits exude a depth of melancholy that resonates with anyone who has felt the losses of time and the distorted visions of memories that hover, insistently, somewhere in the hallways of our minds. Nawar’s large, portrait-style paintings, pieced meticulously and laboriously together with coloured layer after layer of finely-dripped oils, appear almost translucent, colourless, like faded watercolours, despite the contrasting reality of their nature and texture and making.

Nawar, who studied painting at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, London, and also has a degree in psychology, is as precise about the conception of her technique as she is about the choice of her subject.

Her first publicly exhibited body of work, Photo Album, is the result of an adaptation to canvas of the emotions that emerged and evolved in the hours and weeks
and months of staring, no less, at a selection of family photographs from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Her choice of the photograph as a medium to work from, and the canvas as one to work to, was constructed with the same calculated precision as the paintings themselves, and it is in that gap between the photograph and the self that the work has unfolded.

“As a young girl I used to spend many hours in the dark room next door watching photographs being developed,” she says of the photographic studio, Bella, that adjoins
her studio (once her father’s) in downtown Cairo. “I would watch the layers of the photograph slowly come into formation from out of a haze. Layer after layer.”

It is that same process that she has replicated with the layers of her oils, choosing to work from some of the remaining photographs that emerged from the studio next door, bringing them into formation, layer after layer, but instead of bringing them to life, almost fading them away, to that point of hazy distortion when they are neither really here, nor there, neither really present, nor absent.

The sophistication of Nawar’s technique of taking the photographic dark room developing process and working it in reverse through oils – as well as her conscientious and conscious use of the canvas - speaks of an equal sophistication of artistic vision that is often quite lacking in the formation of art from the region. But it perhaps makes sense that this Cairo-born and bred artist has an appreciation for the almost-cinematic possibilities of the canvas, for she grew up not only surrounded by still images, but also Egyptian cinema in its golden days, where her mother was a rising star. The noticeable influence of the cinematic and visual narrative in her work makes as much sense to her concept as it does to technique, and the visual language she is choosing to use speaks equally to the Golden Age of cinema and the Dark Room as it does to the contemporary visual language of art and the image today. She reclaims with her technique the place of the painting in an artistic landscape where the photograph had once declared the painter obsolete.

Where Nawar will take the deliberation of her stroke, and what she will conceive through the interplay
of reality, memory, emotion, cultural history and imagination, may perhaps be a departure from the album of family photos, but also perhaps not, for in Nawar is not only a personal story, but also, somehow, the capturing of a collective memory – not just of a city and country and national history, but of a feeling that is pertinent to humanity across boundaries of space as well as time.

- YR

Galila Nawar

EGYPT NEWS - Photo album: A homage to the past in Egypt

Contemporary Practices

Collection