Born 1998 in Los Angeles, California. Lives and works between L.A. and London.
Cairo Dwek gained a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University London in 2023. Prior to her BA the artist had become recognised for her expansive, abstract canvases and their interplay of scale and minute detail. Recent paintings present a move away from overtly abstract pieces based on astrological phenomena and notions of the sublime. Waves, lights, horizons and voids populate subtly narrative scenes, functioning as metaphors for temporality and fleeting cohesion, and expressing an ongoing interest in states of flux. Cairo Dwek’s work is held in many private collections, and includes a collaboration with Disney.
Recent Work
Paintings such as Digital Dust (2022) allude to a reframing of the quality of dissolution evident in pointillism within the context of ‘the digital’. For ‘dots’ read ‘pixels’. A sense of borderless immersion and illusory collapse underpins these idyllic scenes. Using the dispersion and converging of dots to create forms, there is a physicality to these paintings, a stepping in and out demanded of the viewer that acknowledges the influence of op art artists such as Bridget Riley and their use of scale, repetition and rhythm.
This personal, intimate interpretation of the abstracted, universal and grandiose is echoed in the contrast between the paintings mechanistic precision and the imperfections of the human hand. The paintings propose that we are an imperfect ‘part of’, rather than an idealistic ‘apart from’, and the characters inhabiting their stories seem simultaneously fortified by and lost within the vast expanses of space, water and sky. The passing of time is a recurrent theme, reflected in the tidal seesaw, a consequential ripple, the texture of a voice or the letting go of the past inherent in Chinese lantern festivals. The suggestion of both a physical and metaphysical response to nature can be seen in Into The Well (2023) which evokes the symbolism of a well, something from which we derive physical sustenance (water), as well as aspirations, dreams and whimsical diversions (wishing wells).
As we step in and out of these liquescent images we encounter a joining of life’s dots, and a mapping of experience inscribed in meditative explorations of wishing wells, ancestral voices, silent forests, midnight swims, star-gazers, the rings of a felled tree trunk, and the sense of impending revelation inherent in the turning of a corner.