In September Mashrabia Gallery will launch a new season after the summer break with Egyptian artist Ahmed Sabry's solo exhibition titled The White Smoke.

Sabry has been using references from mass media and digital pop culture in his paintings since 2008, exploring the relationship between written news, television announcements, and images in the background which he incorporates into his paintings and drawings.

In this exhibition, his work is based on a Facebook page that appeared in 2011 during the revolution which promoted conspiracy theories and warned Egyptian people about plotting enemies.

The images shared on that Facebook page had a certain aesthetic, combining photos from several sources with texts and information in the form of a collage, which are meant to help analyse the conspiracies and unlock their codes.

“As these posts were conceptually and visually rich, Sabry benefited from this media image and used it as a source for the production of his latest body of works, the works which assume to be sending codes waiting for someone to decode them,” the exhibition description reads.

Sabry in turn transformed these into symbols, to create works which resemble classic oil paintings in terms of technique and colour treatment, yet wholly differ in subject.

Born in 1982, Sabry is a graduate of the Faculty of Art Education at Helwan University.

Programme:

The exhibition opens on 17 September and will run till 26 October

Open daily except for Friday, from 11am to 8pm

Mashrabia Gallery, 8 Champollion St., Downtown, Cairo

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