Hend Samir

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Real Pain is deeply honored to present Egyptian painter Hend Samir's first solo exhibition in the United States—the spellbinding, beguiling and utterly masterful "Running in a Skewed Daydream." Samir's canvases teem with figures engaged in activities borne of her unique brushwork. Tender familial scenes, quotidian vignettes, forlorn visages, taboo sex, and moments of reverie and communal celebration are buttressed by a dappled maelstrom of paint that pushes and pulls at their arbitrary and socially contrived bounds. Utilizing the ornate trappings of her childhood home in Cairo, Samir presents us with a powerful meditation on the fragmentary character of domestic space as held in the nadir of the mind. Her figures are known to us as exclusively "in-process" apparitions, as are buildings, public spaces, vehicles and abstract piles that dissolve easily into one another. Color and scale are critical tools, and monochrome works are often broken by a single splash of color, a red herring that recalls a spotlight left accidentally trained on a stray stage prop. Breaking a long focus on modest canvases that function like family photos or mementos, Samir has created a mural to span the north wall of the gallery, inviting the viewer to enter into and move through the relational space of the painting, encountering its "doing" and "undoing" in real time. Devoid of their narrative trappings, Samir's figures often face the viewer, happy not in the way of young people left to their own devices, but as we might like them to be: painfully innocent, participating reluctantly in the staged production of that which can be looked upon fondly at some point in the future. Samir is currently in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.