Artists

Souad Abdelrassoul is a multidisciplinary artist and academic whose practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and graphic design. Based in Cairo, she works fluidly between abstraction and figuration, intertwining human, animal, and vegetal forms to articulate a belief in the intrinsic connection between all living beings and the natural world. Her compositions frequently feature metamorphosed figures—tree-like bodies with branching veins and arteries, hybrid insect forms, and botanical anatomies—that collapse distinctions between the internal human experience and the external environment.

Adopting a surrealist sensibility, Abdelrassoul’s work foregrounds femininity, emotion, and transformation. Drawing from her lived experiences as a woman and a mother, she explores the evolving role of women within patriarchal societies, emphasizing adaptation, resilience, and self-discovery. Through references to myth, legend, and folklore, her paintings construct narrative worlds that question entrenched cultural histories and societal expectations. By reconfiguring perceptions of space, form, science, and nature, she creates strikingly personal visual languages that challenge conventional ideals of beauty and representation.

Abdelrassoul earned her BFA from El Minya University in 1998, completed a master’s degree in Art History in 2005, and received her PhD in Modern Art History in 2012. Alongside her artistic practice, she is active as an educator and has led art workshops for children in Egypt and internationally. She also works as a designer, producing book covers and illustrations for children’s literature, extending her visual language into educational and narrative contexts.

She has exhibited widely since the late 1990s, with solo exhibitions in Cairo, Dakar, and Nairobi, including Behind the River (2021) and Unstable Worlds (2024) at Circle Art Gallery. Notable group exhibitions include East African Encounters (2021) and A Never Ending Longing (2022) at Cromwell Place, London; Like a Single Pomegranate (2023) at the Fitzrovia Gallery, presented by the Almas Foundation and accompanied by a monograph; and Finding My Blue Sky (2025), curated by Omar Kholeif at Lisson Gallery, London. Her work has been shown at major art fairs in London, Dubai, Marrakech, and The Armory Show in New York (2022). That same year, she was commissioned to create work for the façade of the Hayward Gallery, London, and was featured in Phaidon’s 300 Great Women Painters.

Abdelrassoul was a finalist for the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize in 2023 and has continued to participate in major international platforms, including Gallery Misr presentations at Abu Dhabi and 1-54 London Art Fairs, with upcoming participation in Art Basel Qatar (2026) and the Cape Town Art Fair. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Worcester Art Museum, the Chazen Museum of Art, and the Fortress House Museum.