Nada Elkalaawy Egyptian, b. 1995

Nada Elkalaawy approaches painting as a form of world-building, constructing images that hover between recollection and invention while exploring the relationship between memory, identity and fiction. Her compositions bring fragments from different sources, places and periods into a single pictorial space, creating scenes that feel familiar without fully belonging to a particular time nor narrative. They often begin with recognisable details, such as domestic objects, family portraits or references from art history, but subtle shifts in scale and perspective, alongside reflections and repeated forms, introduce a sense of uncertainty, blurring the distinction between what is remembered and what is imagined.

Raised between Alexandria and London, her work is informed by an ongoing interest in cultural histories, belonging and the emotional significance of everyday life. Photography is an important reference in her process, but the photographic image is treated as material to be dismantled rather than reproduced. Drawing from an extensive archive of family albums, still lifes, daguerreotypes, auction catalogues and found imagery, she isolates and recombines details according to their visual or emotional resonance. A figure may come from one image, an interior from another, while a still life might be manipulated or imagined entirely. Objects that might otherwise go unnoticed take on a central role in her work and are given unusual degrees of presence. Flowers and plants suggest cycles of loss and renewal, while decorative memorabilia, particularly tableware, become quiet witnesses to the relationships and experiences that shape our lives. These recurring motifs evoke ideas of ritual, regeneration and preservation. Through carefully constructed crops, shadows and mirrored forms, she transforms ordinary scenes into something more otherworldly, inviting closer attention to overlooked details and leaving space for viewers to bring their own associations to what they encounter.

Alongside painting and drawing, Elkalaawy works with animation and tapestry, exploring how different materials and processes can shape our experience of time. Her stop-motion animations introduce movement and duration into the painted image, while her tapestries are built through the slower, repetitive process of weaving. These works offer different ways of approaching the themes that run throughout her practice, with each woven thread carrying a sense of time, touch and accumulated memory. Across all forms, Elkalaawy creates images that hold multiple dualities and tensions at once: presence and absence, familiarity and surreality, and preservation and erasure. The past is not depicted as stable or recoverable, but remains active and changeable, continually taking on new forms in the present.

This instability continues through the physical making of the works, where a sense of haunting is built into their material history. Images are depicted, obscured, and reconstructed through layers of paint, translucent veils and erasures. Elkalaawy’s approach is equally concerned with what remains beneath the surface. She often returns to earlier canvases, reworking existing images or incorporating fragments from abandoned compositions. Rather than concealing these changes, she allows traces of previous works to remain, creating paintings in which images appear to emerge, recede and take on new meaning. Moving between figuration and abstraction, her work reflects the way memories shift over time, retaining certain details while allowing others to fade.