What Farid represents in his late yet triumphant career shift to art after decades as a successful businessman, is perhaps his most crowning achievement; the timeless message that it is never too late to follow your heart’s passion.
Born in 1950 in Cairo, where he currently lives and works, Ahmed Farid is a self-taught abstract painter who trained privately through immersion apprenticeships in established artists’ studios. With a degree in social sciences and an early career in marketing communication and business, Farid’s initial encounter with art and his subsequent career within it, was borne out of his extensive travels in the early 70s. He began exhibiting across Egypt in 2008, becoming a Safarkhan resident artist in 2016. His work has been prominently featured abroad from Beirut, London, and Dubai where his works have sold at Christie’s auctions, to New York and Florence, the former where his works have been acquired by Chase Gallery and the latter where he retains his role as a Visiting Professor of Art at the Accademia D’Arte Firenze (Florence).
Farid is himself a bi-product in his professional capacity of the dual perspective of post-1960s American pop cultural mythology, meshed with his experiences and traditional roots in the effervescent Egyptian socio-political collective experience. Farid continues to draw upon his own opinionated positions on the dynamics that animate the bustling Cairene metropolis, and Egyptian life more broadly. From this unique perch, he delves into the addictively chaotic chasm of metropolitan life and all that it entails. His characteristic brand of abstraction are dynamic variegated meditations on phenomena including superorganisms such as urban metropolises, or meteorological, like the changing seasons, as well as philosophical concepts of conflict, seclusion, accumulation and intersectionality.
Ahmed Farid now arguably enjoys the undisputed position as Egypt’s top abstract contemporary artist. Regionally and internationally too, Farid’s evocative, adventurous and vivacious canvases have gained him legions of admirers and cemented his place as Egypt’s most in-demand contemporary abstract artist. Moreover, what Farid represents in his late yet triumphant career shift to art after decades as a successful businessman, is perhaps his most crowning achievement; the timeless message that it is never too late to follow your heart’s passion.
