I’m Tasneem Bahr, a genuine Egyptian visual artist at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Zamalek, specializing in oil painting. I approach art and beings as a means of living and surviving, rather than simply as an aesthetic practice. My primary focus is oil painting, though I also explore sculpture, comics, and digital photography, depending on my own intellectual purpose.

My artistic interests revolve around the embodiment and confrontation of emotions, social critique, memory, and popular culture. I draw inspiration from cinema, music, and philosophy, and sometimes from reinterpreting classical and Renaissance works in contemporary forms that incorporate absurdist or symbolic elements. I tend to employ surrealism as a means of reshaping reality; sometimes ironically, sometimes shockingly, with the aim of revealing psychological, social, and human contradictions. In my work, I focus on posing questions rather than providing answers, striving to create a space for reflection and questioning, and exploring the free zone between reality and dream.

Artist Statement

I approach art as a space for understanding and directly confronting complex emotions. I see art as a means of reshaping reality; it’s like a problem that chooses its own solution, and the subject chooses its own method of execution, whether in written text or as colors on a canvas. I am deeply interested in reality, not to simply reproduce it as it is, but to reveal what lies hidden within it. I try to explore psychological contradictions, human fragility, and the violence that sometimes lurks behind everyday, familiar things.

I tend to employ surrealism, symbolism, and visual irony to create worlds that seem both familiar and strange, where dreams and memories, reality and imagination, intertwine. I draw inspiration from cinema, music, and popular culture, and I am interested in reinterpreting classic and contemporary images from a personal perspective that is both critical and emotional.

In my work, I do not seek to provide direct answers, but rather to create a state of questioning and reflection, and to push the viewer to confront his own feelings and his relationship with the world around him, so that he may try to find the answer.

Exhibitions