The Artists

Hazem El Mestikawy (1965–2024) was a Swiss-Egyptian visual artist whose practice moved between architecture, sculpture, design, and drawing. Educated at Minya University, he lived and worked between Cairo and Alexandria and exhibited internationally across Europe, North Africa, and beyond. His work combined references to ancient Egyptian and Islamic architecture with modernist and Bauhaus-influenced minimalism, earning him global recognition, including the Jameel Prize in 2011.

Working primarily with lightweight materials such as cardboard and paper, El Mestikawy created installations and sculptural forms that appeared solid and monumental despite their fragility. His practice explored structure, light, volume, and spatial perception, challenging the boundaries between permanence and ephemerality. Rooted in architectural thinking, his drawings and sculptures translated principles of precision, balance, and construction into restrained geometric compositions that engage both historical visual systems and contemporary abstraction.

Huda Lutfi is one of Egypt’s leading contemporary artists whose contribution since the early 1990s has amassed global recognition in numerous international art venues. Trained as a cultural historian, she had a long academic career before dedicating her time to producing art where her intimate knowledge of and engagement with multiple historical, aesthetic, and mystical traditions are not only inspirational but central to her art practice. Indeed, much, if not all, of her work can be considered a translation of her research in the academic world into images and symbols for the artistic one. 

Her work is infused with a spiritual depth that is expressed in her use of poetry and texts, her incorporation of signs, script, and geometrical figures that are accentuated through the meditative power of repetition. Just as Lutfi’s work is marked by spontaneity, playfulness, and simplicity, it simultaneously invokes an inward psychological experience as well as spiritual stillness and steadfastness. The human body often offers a canvas for the personal and becomes central to Lutfi’s artistic lexicon: mutilated, dismembered, constrained, shrouded, commodified, but also iconic, euphoric, dancing, floating, and ephemeral. Here too, Lutfi defies fixed oppositions of dichotomies, blurring the boundaries between the feminine and the masculine, the spiritual and the physical to foreground their interplay in the creative process.

Marwan Fayed is an artist, architect and researcher whose work navigates the intersection of material memory and the philosophical dimension of decay. Further, his work as an architecture scholar addresses gaps between traditional architectural rigor and modern expressive forms, embodied memory of space, semantics of dematerialization and aesthetics of loss.   

His current body of work This Flower Has A Shadow  explores both somatic and botanical bio-forming as a door for higher poetic presences of contemplation. The series is in continual formation and it comprises more than 90 drawings, carried out since November 2024.  

Nour El-Sherif is a multimedia artist. She is an artisan and a designer in the first place. Making is a way to respond to the need to understand how things exist. She works closely with paper — a material she has used since childhood and instinctively returns to as the starting point of all her practices — as well as with clay and textile. At the core of her artistic journey is a persistent need for contemplation as a reason to keep looking and living. The drawing series here exhibited is a private and intimate recollection of a persistent and deeply personal inquiry.