Amr Elkafrawy

Since the start of my artistic career, I have experimented with multiple art forms but have found myself most keen on drawing, painting and printing. I find myself always returning to classical forms as the drive for my own mode of self-expression, especially in regard to concepts that I am most intrigued by like the city, urbanization, and the social relations that develop within them. I always carry my camera around the city during my daily journeys to capture the presence of life in front of me, then for long hours, I go through the many spontaneous photographs that I took. I never know what caused me to identify with this photo or that; is it because of a strong presence? Or because of an absolute solitude? I am interested in the poetics of spaces and the aesthetics of cityscapes, urbanism and what inspires me the most are cities. I consider myself as a cityscape artist, sometimes I work with deferent concepts but I always go back to make more and more work about cities, and how they represent a collage of lives and destinies of their residents and visitors; of finding and defining the similarities and differences between people, buildings, districts, and streets in multiple different cultures and creating a visual pattern of these concepts. I would like to understand the impact of the cities on its residents; how cities were created and evolved, and what is the history of the buildings itself. Also, I am interested in combining deferent art forms like poetry, photography, documents, drawings, maps and old photography to recreate realistic prospects that reflects my ideas. My work repeatedly involves sets of images that complement each other. I use photography and laser digital printing, following which I paint over them with watercolors and ink to recreate realistic visual concepts. This technique allows me to evoke realistic scenes that intensify a dreamy and mysterious dimension to the way I reconstruct my experience about the city.

Amr El-Kafrawy was born in Cairo in 1980; he lives and works in the same city. He was graduated from the faculty of fine art in Cairo in 2003 where he studied painting, also he received a poster design diploma from warsaw university in 2007. He achieved many prices in the Egyptian youth Salon also he granted many artist in residency programs in Poland, Spain, Morocco and Switzerland. El-Kafrawy is working with different mediums such as drawing, painting, illustration and graphic design and printing. In addition to Egypt, he has exhibited in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Morocco, Qatar, UAE and Cuba.

Image: Drawing and printing on recycled paper, 2019