Fathi HASSAN

Fathi Hassan was born in Cairo in 1957. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples in 1984. In 1988 he participated in the XXIII Venice Biennale representing Africa in Aperto 88. He has exhibited in Rome, Milan, Paris, London, New York, Washington, Alexandria, Egypt and Cairo. Hassan’s art does not reject the frontal relationship with reality but chooses the dialogue between East and West, the opening of differences and analogies. Within his work we recognize the profound bond that the artist has with his land of origin.

The themes that Hassan prefers are the oral tradition, the Nubian people, the memory of the past and the desert, themes that are reworked and reinterpreted in the constant search for new meanings and contaminated by contributions coming from the Italian artistic tradition, a reality in which the artist he has been living for twenty years now. Linked to light and white, understood as a luminous value and visual field that contains all the chromatic possibilities, it leads us into a real but at the same time imaginary geographical universe, full of animals of the African land, pervaded by the charm of silence and the regret of large spaces. With the sand writing of the desert and the Nubian land, Hassan operates an imaginary time machine that transports us to the strong Mediterranean nature of his culture but with continuous references to other cultural horizons. His work is expressed through painting but does not disdain installations, photography and performances.