Ibrahim
El Dessouki

Born in Cairo, Egypt in 1969, Ibrahim El Dessouki worked as a professor of painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo from 1992 to 2017, when he became a full-time painter. He grew up in a family of painters interested in literature, translation and Egyptology — an inheritance that extends from press illustration to literary and art-critical translation and to ancient Egyptian history.

He obtained his Master's Degree in 1997, entitled The School of London and British Painting since 1945, and his PhD in 2003, entitled Dynamics in Painting. El Dessouki explores various themes and subjects, developing different techniques in oil that reflect and refer to the essence of each subject: between adding multiple layers of colour and scratching them back with sharp or soft tools to reveal what lies beneath; between meticulously condensed detail and completely flat space; between a commitment to perspective at times and a deliberate refusal of it at others.

Most of his work reflects, refers to and sometimes documents Egyptian reality, holding a hidden perspective between colour and composition. His work is held in the collections of the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Al-Ahram Press Organisation, the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art (Qatar), the Ramzi Dalloul Art Foundation (Beirut), the Department of Culture and Tourism (UAE), the Al-Mansouria Foundation, Dar Al Funoon and the Saudi Ministry of Culture.