Hend Samir’s paintings are portals into a disquieting, alchemical world. Her canvases see figures slowly emerge — like geological forms surfacing over millennia, coaxed into being by the liquid pressures of her brushstrokes. Excavating layers of paint, she extracts pre-existences from the chaos of fluid, atemporal landscapes, drawing out characters engaged in subversive acts — indifferent to, but aware of the viewer’s gaze. 

The vagaries of remembering shape her compositions, with individual frames and scenes acting as triggers that unlock relationships to subsequent images, formally replicating the unfolding of episodic memory. The resulting echoes appear more vivid as images than their original referents. 

Using a palette reminiscent of fine art painting, Samir toys with tonality through a wet on wet technique which simultaneously blends and outlines her figures. The cognitive aspect of looking at an image informs her process, with the artist losing and then finding the characters of her vignettes in the layers of paint, allowing the materiality of her medium to dictate part of the result. Scenes begun under one premise may morph into something entirely different as Samir reacts to the painting’s suggestive power, maintaining a constant energy throughout that gives rise to a cohesive image born of both manipulation and concession. Her artistic process mirrors the viewer’s reception in its meandering construction of meaning, with both artist and audience finding themselves locked in a relational state that undulates, rippling inwards and outwards, coming closer and pushing farther, as the painting dictates.

Her paintings demand a physical closeness for the inspection of their minute vignettes, and a lateral movement to follow the unfolding narrative of her larger panoramas, which defy comprehension in their entirety at once. The abstract spaces she creates manage to nevertheless maintain a sense of depth and dimension. Though seemingly warped, the worlds in which her characters exist comply with a certain compartmentalised logic, with a clearly delineated sense of inside and outside. Her paintings often employ a cross-sectional perspective, giving the impression of an interior world of tensions and illicit desires suddenly spliced open for all to see.

Samir’s technique necessitates an intentional flattening of her source material, rendering the origin of the images and gestures that make up her emulsive worlds irrelevant, and subjugating them to a narrative of her own creation. In rearranging the relationships governing individuals in intimate spaces, Samir questions the authority of family mores and the pervasive illusion of innocence, edifying instead the pulsating energy of adolescence; a force as unsettling as it is transformative.

HEND SAMIR (B. 1986) is an Egyptian artist based in Amsterdam and Cairo, working primarily with painting, as well as printmaking, mixed media and video. She graduated from the Helwan University Faculty of Fine Arts, Printed Designs department in 2008.

Her solo shows include “Hide and Seek,” Harkawik, New York (2022); “Running in a Skewed Daydream,” Real Pain, Los Angeles (2021); “Hula Hoop Labyrinth,” Gallery Misr, Cairo (2018); and ‘The Chocolate Bar of the Future,” Medrar, Cairo (2015).

Her contribution to contemporary painting has been recognized through her residency (as the first Egyptian painter to have been accepted) at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 2021. She is a winner of the Dutch Royal Award for Modern Painting, leading to a group show at the Koninklijk Paleis Amsterdam to make the award’s 150th anniversary. She is a nominee for the Wolvecamp Prize 2022, and her work has been acquired by the Rubell and the Hammer Museums, as well as by significant private collectors.

Samir has shown her work at London Frieze 2021, and in group shows including the 7th Cairo Video Festival at Medrar Gallery (2017), Photo Cairo 6 at CIC (2016) and Log-In at Darb 1718 (2016).

Internationally, her work has featured in exhibitions in the US, Sweden, France, Spain and Belgium. .