Draft:Samir Fouad

Samir Fouad 1944 is considered one of the prominent artists in the Egyptian art movement. known for his unique visual language which draws from the traditions of painting and is concerned with the juxtaposition of arrest and movement.

Biography
Samir Fouad was born in Cairo in 1944 and although showing outstanding talent in painting since early childhood he went on to study electronic engineering and graduated from Cairo University in 1966 with a  B.Sc in Communications Engineering. He then pursued a successful career in computer engineering and information technology which lasted for 34 years, but at the same time continuing his passion for art.

Career
Samir Fouad had his first one-man show in England in 1970 and the second in Cairo in 1977; he started to share in the Egyptian art scene from the early eighties in national and other joint exhibitions and was well known in this period for his artistically unique watercolors.

In 1997 he held a major watercolor exhibition which left a strong impression in art circles, then in 2001 he decided to leave his job to devote himself to art full-time. Since 1997 he has held eighteen one-man shows, represented Egypt in the International Watercolour Biennale in 2001, the International Luxor Symposium in 2011, and had a co-exhibition with the Italian artist Franco Rizoli in Venice in 2016 and a major retrospective at Ofok Gallery in Mahmoud Said Museum, Cairo in 2018.

Works
His works have been exhibited in various countries such as the USA, UK, Italy, France, Russia, Kenya, Dubai, Kuwait, Lebanon, South Africa and Saudi Arabia.

Samir Fouad’s art is derived from various influences:  growing up in post-war Heliopolis gave him a cosmopolitan dimension and his continuous search into the human existence and in the correlation between music and visual arts gives him a distinctive artistic vision which is conveyed in his main concern with the representation of the passing of time in his work.

His artistic content is predominantly expressionist and his visual language draws from the heritage of painting to the horizons of modernism, but his state of mind and mood is thoroughly Egyptian with an underlying

socio-political theme, selecting the subjects of his paintings from the culture and soil of his motherland.