The Magician

Egyptian artist Souad Abdelrassoul creates enigmatic figurative paintings that explore how women are perceived and the restrictive roles of men and women in society. She rarely provides much information on the exact subject of her narrative paintings, preferring the viewer to interpret the scenes given their own experiences and emotions. Her paintings often feature plant life, and Abdelrassoul considers humans and nature to be interrelated. Although she lives in Egypt, the formal qualities of her work are in dialogue with Sudanese contemporary painting. She earned a BFA in 1998, an MA in the history of art in 2005, and a PhD in modern art history from Helwan University in 2012. Although her studies concentrated on European art, she writes that once she began traveling throughout Africa, "I started to see that, while as much as I had been attracted to the focus and forms of the European tradition, the bold, tough beauty of African art, including its textiles and sculptures, began working its way into my own painting – something you can obviously see in the wide eyes and even the skin colour of the figures I paint now."