Amal Nasr

"Spirits" Abstract Painting 39" x 28" inch by Amal Nasr

2020

Born in Alexandria in 1965, Dr. Amal Nasr graduated top of her class with a BA in Fine Arts with a specialization in painting in 1988 from Alexandria University. She was appointed as a teaching assistant in the photography department upon graduation, and gained a master’s in photography in 1993. She earned her doctorate of philosophy in 2000 in photography, with a focus on the contemporary vision of the aesthetics of composition in oriental arts. In 2005 she became assistant professor in the photography department at her alma mater before becoming professor with tenure in 2010. Nasr has been a researcher and critic in the field of the visual arts, and has held over seventeen personal exhibitions in Egypt where she has featured in most of the largest collective exhibitions in the country. Nasr has had her works exhibited in the U.K., Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, India, France and China and has conducted workshops in Tunisia, Jordan and Syria besides Egypt. Nasr’s art has earned her accolades domestically, with her first coming in the 1990 Youth Salon’s (Salon El Shabab) second edition where she won the first prize in painting. At the third edition she captured the photography prize a year later, and in 1998 the State Prize for Creativity in the photography section. In 2011 she was again decorated by the government with the State Incentive Award for her role as a critic of fine art, and in 2019 the award for scientific excellence from Alexandria University. Nasr joined Safarkhan’s resident artist family in 2021. Nasr’s painting has gone through various periods, and with each one she has demonstrated her versatility as an artist and the depth of her compositional repertoire. She contemplates the meaning of the ancient arts and combines these messages with new formulas that her imagination concocts. Nasr’s art is therefore inspired by the strange spirit of ancient art, which to her resembles a kind of theatrical performance containing the pictorial language of primitive and ancient civilizations from various sources. The breadth of her artistic portfolio encompasses a variety of styles spanning abstract, figurative, expressionist and impressionist. What makes Nasr’s art special is the sensitivity with which she imagines her canvases, with everything in them from the animals to the humans to even the backgrounds and inanimate shapes and settings pulsating with a palpable enigmatic aura.