Hend Samir

Harkawik is thrilled to present the gallery’s second exhibition with painter Hend Samir, Hide and Seek. Samir, who is based in Amsterdam and who grew up in Egypt, has become recognized for her potent canvases which explode social expectations around the separation of public and private space, the construction of the nuclear family and the partition between childhood and adulthood. Catalyzed by a sense of anger towards societal and gender-based injustices, Samir’s paintings perform their healing of sublimated traumas and their hopeful envisioning of a healthier, freer future. In Hide and Seek, abstraction comes to the fore. Samir’s figures, which dominated the compositions and narratives of previous paintings, here meld with the marbled eddies and whorls of fluid acrylic paint. Often, figures seem in danger of being absorbed back into abstraction, engulfed by the maelstrom of the painting, but paradoxically it is often the paint itself that suggests to Samir new narrative directions and figurative motifs. A sensitive colorist, Samir often works with a narrow palette, a technique that directs the viewer’s attention and ensures coherence across diverse pictorial events, often at epic scale. Hide and Seek includes two mural-sized paintings, amongst the artist’s most ambitious works to date.