About the Artist

About the Artist

Nagwan is a Cairo-based Egyptian painter. Growing up in Cairo, she was surrounded by the rhythms of the city, family life and the visual richness of local markets, textiles and folk objects. She knew from childhood that she wanted to be an artist, and later studied at the Higher Institute of Applied Arts, where she built a solid foundation in drawing, colour and design and has since worked for more than ten years as a teaching assistant, helping to train new generations of artists.

In her work she draws on Impressionist and Cubist traditions, combining them with motifs from Egyptian and popular folk heritage. The central figure in most of her paintings is the woman. Through her, Nagwan explores emotion and contradiction: strength and fragility, joy and melancholy, intimacy and distance. She uses bold, direct colours, with blue playing a special role because of its deep connection to Egyptian visual culture. Each painting begins with an idea or a feeling, such as an old house, a woman listening to the radio or a quiet domestic scene, and develops into a world of pattern, symbol and colour that invites the viewer into that moment.

Motherhood has added new layers to her practice, opening up different emotions and perspectives that appear in her figures and narratives. Alongside her canvases, Nagwan also paints bags, hamsa forms and everyday objects. For her, this is a way of bringing art into daily life, so that people’s eyes become used to the beauty of Egyptian and Arab art. Every object is treated as a small artwork, something that can be carried, used and lived with, rather than only observed on a gallery wall.