Medhat Shafik porta la sua “Odissea” alla Errm Art Gallery di Riyad
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6 March 2025 – Time to read: 5 min
Medhat Shafik Brings His Odyssey to the Errm Art Gallery in Riyadh
The Errm Art Gallery in Riyadh is hosting the exhibition Odyssey, a solo show by Egyptian-Italian artist Medhat Shafik, until March 31, 2025. This exhibition marks the first time Shafik presents his work in the Saudi capital, offering the public the opportunity to immerse themselves in an artistic universe where memory, journey, and identity intertwine in a unique visual language.
Shafik’s Journey Between East and West
Born in El-Badari, Egypt, in 1956, Shafik moved to Italy in 1976, where he studied painting and scenography at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. His work has been described by the Metropolitan Museum of New York as one of the most fascinating expressions of contemporary Arab art, capable of blending the visual vocabulary of Western avant-gardes with the evocations and colors of Eastern culture. The Odyssey exhibition draws inspiration from the poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy, interpreting life as a continuous and layered journey. The works on display evoke this itinerant dimension through a combination of painting, collage, and installations that incorporate reclaimed materials, transforming them into relics of memory and traces of existence.
An Archaeology of Existence
Medhat Shafik’s work can be seen as a sort of archaeological excavation of memory and identity, an artistic endeavor that transcends time and space. As critic Farid Zahi points out, Shafik’s creative process fuses introspection and externalization:
“Shafik elegantly oscillates between the self and the other, between past and present, between detail and the whole. His continuous search translates into an artistic ‘performance’ in which the body and the work become inseparable.”
In the exhibited works, this tension between intimacy and universality is evident. The layering of materials and techniques—raw fabric, paper, incised surfaces, and vibrant pigments—becomes a metaphor for the stratification of history and identity. The artist moves between the recovery of tradition and contemporary experimentation, creating a constant dialogue between roots and innovation.
Between the Tragic and the Mystical
Another fundamental aspect of Shafik’s artistic vision is his relationship with the tragic and the mystical. As Zahi writes:
“At the heart of this dynamic lies a stylistic harmony that defines his work: narrative, even when it leans towards abstraction; spiritual, even when it approaches rationality; playful, even when confronting the tragic.”
In Odyssey, this tension between the tragic and the spiritual is expressed through works in which the past resurfaces with evocative power—not with nostalgia, but with the desire to revive fragments of human experience. The use of humble materials, often worn by time, gives his compositions an almost ritualistic quality, as if each work were an act of remembrance and resistance against oblivion.
Shafik’s Epic Imprint: Between Narrative and Abstraction
Shafik’s ability to merge narrative and abstraction is one of the hallmarks of his artistic language. His work does not simply tell stories but dissolves, layers, and transforms them into a vocabulary of signs and symbols— a visual alphabet that reflects his personal archaeology of existence. The artist seems to construct a new language of memory, in which each collected fragment—be it a piece of fabric, a raw pigment, or an incision on a surface—becomes a tile in a larger fresco of humanity. This approach recalls the concept of a visual palimpsest, where each layer interacts with those that came before, creating a composition that is both physical and metaphysical. The epic nature of Shafik’s work is not that of classic storytelling but rather that of an endless journey, where human destiny is an ongoing interweaving of departures and returns, of loss and rediscovery. As Farid Zahi writes:
“This multifaceted experimentation activates the hidden dimensions of the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intellectual. It is an art that becomes a mystical and dynamic experience, capable of engaging the viewer in a journey of self-discovery and reflection on the world.”
A Universal Message
Through Odyssey, Medhat Shafik invites the viewer on a journey between memory and transformation, past and future. His works are not merely personal narratives but open up to a universal reading, where the sense of wandering becomes a shared existential condition. His ability to unite the personal and the collective, the ancient and the contemporary, makes him an artist capable of translating the essence of the human journey into images. With this exhibition, the Errm Art Gallery in Riyadh reaffirms its role as a space attentive to the international art scene, welcoming an artist who, with his layered and deeply evocative visual language, invites us to reconsider the meaning of our journey through the world.
The exhibition is the result of three years of negotiations and work and has been realized in collaboration between Mr. Mohammed El Saawy, owner and director of Errm Art Gallery in Riyadh, and Mr. Mohammed Talaat, owner and director of Misr Gallery in Cairo.
The Odyssey exhibition is open at the Errm Art Gallery, located at Al Mossa Center, Gate No. 1, Olaya Street, Riyadh, until March 31, 2025.
