Takwa Sabry starts a painting with a plan. A composition already formed, a color palette chosen, something she can see but cannot touch. Then she begins, and the middle layers arrive. Paint mixes in ways she didn't expect. Layers intersect. Marks accumulate. "The surprises, the small surprises that happen during the process," she said, "is actually the moment where I can click and I can say, this is the moment." That middle state, neither preparation nor finished surface, is where she says the painting finds its actual direction. The starting image may not survive it.
This is not a romantic account of chaos. Sabry, an Egyptian painter based in Dubai, describes the process with the matter-of-fact attention of someone who has watched it happen enough times to trust it. Her training began at a drawing school with artist Nazir Tanbouli between 2015 and 2016, followed by Mass Alexandria's contemporary art program with artist Wael Shawky from 2016 to 2017 — before she completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting in 2018. The sequence matters: the technical grounding came first, then the program oriented toward contemporary practice, then the degree. That order is visible in how precisely she talks about what happens on a surface, even when what she's describing is accident.
Her recent body of work, which includes The Inner Queen (2026), Tides of Emotions (2025), Whispers in the Bloom (2025), and Viva La Vida (2024), works in acrylic on canvas. When asked to name one painting where the sense of aliveness she talks about is most clear, she declined to single one out. The recent work as a whole, she said, carries it. That refusal is telling. The paintings are not discrete statements; they are accumulations of a practice she describes as ongoing, something she returns to across emotional states without hierarchy between them. She can paint while happy, while sad, while anxious. The condition is only that she is feeling something.
Viva La Vida (2024) sits within this recent run as a useful point of entry. The title — borrowed from the Spanish phrase meaning "long live life" — signals something about the register Sabry is working in: not resolution, but vitality. In acrylic on canvas, the work belongs to the same body she describes as translating contrast and ongoing feeling into surface. She has not singled it out as a masterwork; it is one node in a continuous practice. But the title does something the other recent works' titles don't quite do — it names an attitude toward the act of making, rather than a subject or an emotional state. That distinction is worth noting when reading the whole body of work together.
What she wants a viewer to register, standing in front of that work, is contrast. Thick brushstrokes against thin ones. A bold mark next to something small and handled with care. She described this in terms of what the surface should communicate physically: the thin layers versus the thick brushstrokes, the bold mark and then the very tiny, sensitive brushstrokes drawing small little things. The scale shifts are not decorative. They are, by her account, how the work keeps moving, how it holds the sense that something is still in process even after it's finished.
The motifs that recur across the work arrive the same way the middle-layer surprises do: without a predetermined decision. Paint drips. A sunflower appears. A human eye. A hot-air balloon. And a star, drawn in a specific shape that Sabry traces to ancient Egyptian temple ceilings, where it represents Nut, the goddess of the sky. She visited those temples in Luxor and saw the star engraved there. The symbol entered her vocabulary and stayed. "Maybe you see them, maybe not," she said of these recurring signs, "but they are always there representing me, representing where I came from, blending in my identity, blending in my thoughts, in my style."
She is careful not to overstate the intentionality. Asked how she decides whether to make the star visible or bury it in layers, she pushed back on the premise. There is no decision, she explained — it appears because it is part of her, part of what she called her artistic character. If a viewer misses it entirely, that is acceptable. When they do find it, she hopes they feel something, connect to something, discover something. The stars, she noted, are a symbol most people can meet on their own terms. For her the specific form carries a personal charge that doesn't require transmission to remain present in the work.
The period at Mass Alexandria, working within Wael Shawky's contemporary art program from 2016 to 2017, is worth pausing on. Shawky's own practice is built around historical narrative, archival material, and the reframing of inherited imagery — an approach that treats symbols and cultural memory as active rather than decorative. Whether or not Sabry's use of ancient Egyptian motifs connects directly to that environment is not something she stated in the interview. What the training period does establish is that she was working, at a formative stage, in a context where the question of how symbols carry meaning across time was taken seriously as an artistic problem. The drawing school period with Tanbouli preceded this, providing the technical foundation on which the later conceptual questions could sit. The sequence — technical grounding, then a program oriented toward contemporary practice, then the degree — is visible in how she moves between what happens on the surface and what it might mean, without treating either as primary.
This creates a particular kind of viewing experience, one she described with unusual directness. She said she is made happy like a child when someone at an exhibition moves closer to the canvas rather than standing back. She does a lot of detail work, some of it small enough that it only resolves at close range. The physical proximity is not incidental. It is the condition under which certain parts of the painting become legible. The viewer who stays at a distance gets one painting; the viewer who steps forward gets another.
What she hopes they carry away from that closer look is an emotional sense and a memory — recognition rather than instruction. She wants a viewer to feel happiness or curiosity, to sense that the painter was working through something, and then to find their own associations. The chain she sketched out in conversation was deliberately ordinary: a coastal city, a sunset, a rainy day, a sunny one. She is asking for a felt response, whatever that turns out to be, not a reading of her intentions.
The question she said keeps returning to her across the work is how to give shape or presence to things she can feel but cannot say in words. She described going to the canvas instead of talking, using the surface as the primary place where feeling gets processed. This is a description of how she personally works, not a claim about painting's superiority to language. The studio is where she goes when the feeling is present and the words are not available or not sufficient.
Her artist statement for Maps of Emotions, a body of work she describes as tracing the unseen landscapes of the human heart, frames this in terms of emotional cartography: joy as wide-open space, grief as compressed zones, longing as horizon. It is a more schematic account than the one she gives in conversation, where the process is less mapped and more discovered. The statement and the interview sit slightly apart from each other, which is not unusual. Artists write about their work one way and talk about it another. The interview version is less resolved, which makes it more useful for understanding what is actually happening in the studio.
What does seem consistent across both is the insistence on contrast and continuity. The work is not finished in the sense of being closed. The layering, the recurring motifs, the middle-layer accidents that redirect the whole composition — all of it points to a practice that treats each canvas as a site of ongoing activity rather than a delivered conclusion.
"I want them to feel that it's ongoing," she said. "Something is happening. Something is alive."
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