Sara Tantawy’s realist paintings explore a range of human emotions, using allegory and metaphor to describe profound experiences. Her ability to render figures with painstaking detail while creating pensive depictions of isolated figures establishes her work as part of a long tradition of painting, one that aims to unearth the psychological dimensions of portraiture in order to facilitate a reflective experience for the viewer. In her most recent oil on canvas paintings, she invokes the grace and elegance of traditional Egyptian folk dancers as ancient cultural forms that are at once cathartic and transporting.
Based in Cairo, Tantawy (b. 1994) graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Helwan University in 2017, and has been active in Egypt and abroad since then. She has participated in large-scale exhibitions and competitions such as the Beijing International Biennale (2019), the Luxor International Painting Symposium (2020), the Dafen International Oil Painting Biennale, from which she received an award in 2021, and the Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh (2022). Other notable events for the artist include a solo exhibition at Motion Gallery in Cairo (2022) and a group exhibition of Egyptian artists hosted by Meridian Center for Cultural Diplomacy in Washington D.C. (2022).