Alfonse Louis

Born in 1959 in Cairo, Alfonse Louis graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria. Although he specialized with a degree in painting, Louis would later discover his true vocation was instead as a sculptor. In 1982, he became a member of the Alexandria Atelier and of the Alexandria Work Shop Center (AWSC), his work would then see him host various personal solo exhibitions in Cairo and his native Alexandria, having participated in over forty local and international exhibitions since his debut that year, amongst them the 2005 edition of the Alexandria Biennale. 

Louis has had his wooden and multimedia sculptures decorated with the first prize in the National Competition of Plastic Art, and his works have been acquired by the Museum of Fine Art in Cairo, and reside in numerous personal collections abroad including Greece, Canada, Australia, U.A.E. and Belgium. Louis became a resident artist with Safarkhan in 2010 and he is currently one of, if not the, leading wooden sculptor in the country. Louis’ enchanting work involves a painstaking procedure of carving, melding, fashioning and manipulating a variety of materials besides wood, including metal, beads, wire, glass and more, into both conventional and unconventional sculptures.

Louis currently lives and works in his hometown of Alexandria where he has his studio, and his sculpture is demonstrably influenced by the cosmopolitan and multicultural heritage of Egypt’s second city, the ‘jewel of the Mediterranean.’ Therefore, we see in his unique creations a studious amalgamation of aspects, markers and motifs drawn from Coptic, Islamic, Greco-Roman and Pharaonic civilizations, which he develops with a compositional method that is faithfully reminiscent of the artforms of these ancient cultures. Above all, the significance of Alfonse Louis’ art lies in its steadfast veneration and rectification of many of these forgotten and essential forms of foundational art, from which all other art was borne.