Adel Dauood

Adel Dauood’s art is a transition between abstraction and concreteness, expressionism and surrealism, colour explosion and reduction. His small-format paper works are home to fabulous beasts: dangerous and yet friendly they inhabit the roughened paper plane with their long, entwined legs, pointed teeth and numerous eyes and udders.

But of late, these small formats and the black and white of ink or charcoal on paper are not enough to satisfy them – “they need more space and colour”, Dauood says. So they have broken out and now increasingly accompany the humanlike figures in Dauood’s large-sized, bright-coloured oil and acrylic paintings.

Dauood does not make mimetic portraits of concrete persons. He gets to know them only while painting them and burns the midnight oil with them. They are portraits of human nature or humanity itself, portraits of felt, sensed, lived and imagined lives. Dauood’s inspiration pieces his pictures together: a foot here, a face there, arms growing out of a vortex of lines, body parts and bright colours. The fact that banal fragments of reality are consistently found in Dauood’s artistic works – slippers, taps or bowls – underlines how his scenes are formed somewhere between the artistic space and the living space, as well as, reality and fantasy.