Houmam Al Sayed

Place: Damascus

Born: 1981

Biography:

Houmam Alsayed is a Syrian contemporary painter and sculptor. He was born in Damascus, Syria in 1981. After studying sculpture, Al Sayed oriented his work to large-scale figurative paintings. Houmam Al Sayed graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Institute of Applied Arts in Damascus in 2003. He began exhibiting his work at a young age. In 1998 he participated in an exhibition of painting at Teshrin University in Lattakia while he was seventeen years old. Since then, he has exhibited throughout Syria and has participated in group shows and Symposiums in the Arab world and Europe. Houmam Al Sayed's work is characterized by one figure – a stooped male man with a distorted face, bulbous nose, and wide-set eyes arrayed beneath a ubiquitous cloth cap. The figures in al-Sayed's paintings, drawings and sculptures are swollen and misshapen. The crumpled and crushed characters symbolize the widespread public oppression throughout the Middle East, from military rule in Egypt to war-torn Iraq and Syria.