Ahmed Farid
Born in Cairo, 1950 and lives in Cairo
Ahmed Farid is one of the very many autodidact Egyptian painters who trained privately in immersion apprenticeship in established artists’ studios. His paintings are a reflection of his interesting life and background. With a degree in social sciences and an early career in marketing communication and business, Farid’s encounter with painting came through extensive travels in the early seventies, an era that he lived fully with its European post May 1968 culture, its American summer of love and Woodstock repercussions, and above all, its local Egyptian political and social effervescence. Perhaps this local and international concurrent cultural exposure left residues of desire to create the art he cherished and consumed, but was never able to practice except at a later stage in life, precisely in 2003.
Farid started to develop his own painterly personality, possessing a brushstroke that is obsessed by textures and thick pastes of paints; the content of his canvases are many times reminiscent of the Egyptian abstract expressionist Gazebia Sirry or the European expressionist Nicholas de Steal, and his painting practice demonstrates an undeniable visual attraction to less textural American colour field painting.
