Biography
Samo Shalaby grew up between Cairo and Dubai in a family of artists — his mother a painter, his aunt an artist, his sister running her own design practice. He absorbed the methods of making before he understood them. By the time he enrolled at Central Saint Martins in London, he'd already spent years in his mother's studio and several more doing commercial work he found creatively hollow. London changed something. "I didn't necessarily feel like I belonged anywhere before that," he has said. "Then I went to London — that's where it all unleashed." At CSM he studied stage design, costume and jewellery alongside fine art, and the theatrical logic stayed. His paintings feel like scenes from productions that don't exist yet: figures in ambiguous costume, worlds that seem historical but can't quite be placed, narratives that are simultaneously beautiful and uncomfortable. He draws from antiquity, surrealism and the grotesque, filtered through Egyptian and Palestinian heritage that runs through the work as undertone rather than statement. In one painting from 2024, he hid a battle scene, babies wrapped in keffiyehs, a woman holding a blue and white mask — symbols embedded in a composition rich enough that most viewers don't find them immediately. That's deliberate. "I wanted the symbolism to be more of an undertone, for people to find it." He has shown at Abu Dhabi Art, Kiaf Seoul, Soho Revue London, Marignana Arte Venice, and Lee & Bae Gallery Busan. He lives between Dubai and London.
