Investec Cape Town Art Fair's own editorial site carried this feature, headlined "The Works of Renowned Egyptian Artist, Adel El Siwi," to accompany Mashrabia Gallery of Contemporary Art's presentation of his work at the fair. The page carries no byline and no visible publication date, though its placement points to the 2024 edition of the fair.
The text concentrates on two strands of El Siwi's practice. The first is his portraiture: large, vividly coloured canvases of faces that move between abstraction and likeness, which the piece describes through his own formulation of "a sphere atop a cylinder," faces acting as a bridge between origin and outcome. The second is his long-running interest in animals — dogs, cats, birds and reptiles painted as protagonists in their own right rather than as symbols, appearing, in the writer's words, as an "apparition — radiant, inscrutable, and unpredictable." The article traces this to El Siwi's reading across literature, cinema and art history, from Egyptian and Greek mythology to the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine, and to his interest in metamorphosis and morally unresolved encounters between human and animal figures.
Adel El Siwi's Tabari Artspace solo exhibition Yellow Tropics remains the most direct way to see this newer, animal- and portrait-led work in the region.
