Egyptian-born visual artist Hossam Dirar (1978) celebrates beauty. Combining fragmented images of faces, at times of the whole body, Dirar paints chaotic, impulsive and richly multi-layered texturized palettes to express individual identity. Selected as one of the twelve emerging artists of great promise from around the world by Saatchi chief curator in their series ‘Invest in Art’ in 2013, Dirar resuscitates the two-thousand year old art of the Egyptian Fayoum portraits. And while the Fayoum portraits were created to preserve the memory of each individual in the closest way possible, Dirar’s portraits are invented identities, borrowed from an instantaneous stolen glance. Each work depicts an anonymous woman Dirar met – at a café, in a street, at an airport. He conceives his work as a re-interpretation of his memory, of that brief encounter, overlapping between the multi-cultural characters of where they met and his personal take of that instant of visual pleasure.