"El Siwi’s work is an exploration of both historical and contemporary human narratives at a time when self-questioning and a search for meaning about histories, politics and the current state of the world is on every person’s mind."
"Adel El Siwi, an Egyptian painter, is a chronicler and storyteller of his generation. Born in the 1950s, a period of both upheaval and change in postwar and post-revolutionary Egypt, his painting practice spans over fifty years, and it is one which the artist describes as having been one continuous stream of activity and thought. A Cairene by birth, he is as he proclaims in his native Arabic a “Son of the city”–– born from it and of it.
Despite his many travels commenced as a young man and their observatory perambulations, El Siwi has come to define himself through a construct of personal identity with a point of origin set in his native Egypt. His identity is one which has a definition of the self that has an expansive view informed by the greater history not only of Egypt geographically but spiritually, as well as through Egypt’s historical and cultural relationship with the African continent at large.
Yellow Tropics, his first exhibition in over a decade, is a staging of both recently executed paintings and pieces from an archive of earlier works. The paintings shown here collectively present philosophical provocations and musings."
