ArtTalks is pleased to announce Hossam Dirar’s second exhibition at the gallery.
After his highly acclaimed dual show with prominent Syrian artist Sabhan Adam in ‘Beauty and The Beast’ in 2014, Hossam Dirar comes with “Invitation Au Voyage“. A reference to Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poem in Les Fleurs du Mal, Dirar seeks to create an imaginary world to liberate the mind and uses, symbolically and figuratively, a two-wheel ride, a very much en vogue transportation means in our busting city these days. The art of choosing an object, the bicycle, is to reveal a temporary world of freedom, an invitation to meet furthest away from politics, wars, injustices and violence, and to reach an unknown destination au-dela.
Dirar uses the journey, both in time and in space, in order to convey this sense of heightened liberty through a simple means of mobility that we are missing in many Arab cities like Cairo. The presence of the feminine figure, a consistent subject in Dirar’s work, is an outlet of a dream-state, conveying liberation so particular to his work and so meaningful to contemporary Egypt.
Hossam Dirar combines fragmented images of faces, at times of the whole body. He paints chaotic, impulsive and richly multi-layered texturized palettes to express a multitude of feelings – independence, control, indecision, escape, solitude and above all peace. Perhaps the invisible that the artist is chasing in his work is the phantom idea of breaking free from all shackles of society.
Born in 1978, Hossam Dirar lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. A 2002 graduate from the Applied Arts Faculty at Helwan University, Hossam Dirar is a multi-disciplinary artist working across painting, photography, installation, video and graphic. Dirar has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Egypt, Bahrain, Ireland, Slovakia, Germany, France, Italy, Austria and South Africa. His works are conceived as a re-interpretation of Egypt’s rich visual heritage, overlapping between the multi-cultural character of Cairo, the city’s complex and ever expanding urban façade, the region’s traditional iconography and the influence of contemporary media in shaping cultural referents.