Houmam Al-Sayed

Born in Damascus, Syria in 1981, Houmam Al Sayed is a contemporary Syrian artist. After studying sculpture, Al Sayed orients his work to large-scale figurative paintings.

Houmam Al Sayed graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Institute of Applied Arts in Damascus in 2003. He began exhibiting his work at a young age. In 1998 he participated in an exhibition of painting at Teshrin University in Lattakia while seventeen years old. Since then he has exhibited throughout Syria and has participated in group shows and symposiums in the Arab world and Europe.
Al Sayed works across various media, including painting, drawing, and sculpture.

Sayed's work is characterized by one figure – a stooped male man with a distorted face, bulbous nose, and wide-set eyes arrayed beneath a ubiquitous cloth cap.

The figures in al-Sayed's paintings, drawings and sculptures are swollen and misshapen. The crumpled and crushed characters symbolize the widespread public oppression throughout the Middle East, from military rule in Egypt to war-torn Iraq and Syria. As critic Edward Shalda says on the artist's website, ‘Houmam paints unknown people belonging to a known reality.’

Art critic Marie Tomb, in one of al-Sayed's exhibitions catalog, wrote: “In Houmam al-Sayed’s paintings, it is neither a man, nor an ideology, but a nameless and faceless structure whose countless metamorphoses reemerge anywhere they find detractors to silence and abuse citizens.” She continues: “His characters propose a version of what one might be reduced to when the pressure of religion, the state, and ideology is too much to bear.”

Submitted by Galerie Vivendi