Monaiseer’s drawings and paintings are instantly reminiscent of heritage craft with a distinctly ancient and timeworn quality. He manages to aptly delineate mystical and transcendental concepts which serve as the key inspirational sources of his work.
Born in 1989, Mohammed Monaiseer received his BA in Educational Art at the Faculty of Specialized Education in Cairo University. He shortly determined to pursue a career as an artist, featuring in the 2009 edition of Port Said Biennale and having his first solo exhibition in Cairo’s Gezira Art Center in 2013. Monaiseer has since participated in group and solo exhibitions across Egypt which have featured his paintings and large-scale installations. He has also participated in a number of touring exhibitions in Europe and America, and regionally at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, and galleries in Bahrain, U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia where he is currently a resident artist at Athr Gallery in Jeddah. Monaiseer was the main prizewinner at the 25th Youth Salon at the Cairo Opera House (2015), and also is a resident artist at the Delfina Foundation in London since 2019.
Monaiseer’s drawings and paintings are instantly reminiscent of heritage craft with a distinctly ancient and timeworn quality. He manages to aptly delineate mystical and transcendental concepts which serve as the key inspirational sources of his work, namely; alchemy, metaphysics and ancient oral traditions. Much of his work demonstrates a seemingly obsessive element of repetition, which are usually applied to a word, figure or symbol, multiplied and reproduced interminably so as to create a sensation of trance-like enchantment. Monaiseer’s characteristic style involves his original use of vast segments of untreated raw fabric, resembling ancient tapestries or garments. He inscribes these pieces of fabric or canvas with both ethereal and recognizable elements like indecipherable script or mysterious symbols, and anatomical massive-scale representations of insects and plants. Monaiseer’s artistic process is in his own description one that is akin to a ritualistic endeavor, where repetition becomes meditation.