This National feature covers Yellow Tropics, Egyptian painter Adel El Siwi's exhibition at Tabari Artspace, his first solo show in the UAE in more than a decade. Writer Maan Jalal describes walking into large-scale canvases dominated by striking yellows, rich greens and strategic reds, a marked departure from the greys, browns, blacks and whites that had characterised El Siwi's palette across fifty years of practice.
The article traces that shift to a trip El Siwi made to Africa, where he encountered a use of colour he found strange and revelatory after the greyish, dust-laden light of Cairo, prompting him to pursue purer, more intense colour relationships in his work. The show brings together more than ten new paintings alongside selections from his archive, built around the stylised, partly abstracted figures that have long anchored his compositions, dressed in a deliberately ambiguous mix of African, Arab and contemporary clothing. Jalal notes El Siwi's continued fascination with the human face as a compressed, crowded site of identity, and with layered narrative references, from tribal patterns to antique busts, embedded within and around his figures.
Positioned as a late-career statement, Yellow Tropics shows El Siwi extending a decades-long investigation into identity and narrative through a newly opened-up colour language, running at Tabari Artspace until 15 January.
