Basim Magdy

Multidisciplinary artist Basim Magdy began his career creating colorful and futuristic paintings and works on paper before experimenting with analog film and photography in the 2010s. Magdy’s interests in the unconscious, memory, utopia, and the human condition are evident throughout these diverse mediums. The artist strikes a balance between the heaviness and humor of existence. In “The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings,” a survey organized by Deutsche Bank’s KunstHalle that traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the National Museum of 21st Century Art, and Arnolfini, Magdy presented paintings pairing philosophical phrases with rainbow-colored space-age scenes populated by cosmic explorers and UFOs. In 2014, Magdy won the Abraaj Group Art Prize at Art Dubai for The Dent, a short film about hope and failure. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows and international film festivals and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Centre Pompidou, among others.