Nada Elkalaawy's practice delves into what makes an image slip from truth into fiction. Her figurative paintings move beyond recreating photographic imagery, probing themes of presence and absence, quiet transformation, and the traces we leave behind. The paintings are never static; their surfaces become sites of memory, where earlier gestures and layers echo and unfold over time.

Growing up between Egypt and London, Elkalaawy has developed a deep interest in personal histories of belonging and attachment, which resurface through the act of painting. She never works directly from life, instead developing sketches and drawings from her collections of images. Her compositions weave together family photographs, still lifes, art-historical references, and online sources. In this process, she reconsiders the role of inanimate or non-human objects: motifs of flowers and plants emerge as symbols of mourning and regeneration, while domestic dinnerware become a vessel for narrative and emotion. Through mirroring and doubling, she draws attention to uncanny, overlooked details, while shadows and reflective surfaces—constructed through meticulous layering—fragment and unsettle the picture plane. By interlacing multiple temporalities, places, and objects, she creates arresting, often ambiguous renditions of memory.

Although painting anchors her practice, Elkalaawy also extends into mediums that embody temporality in distinct ways. Drawing on photographic strategies such as cropping, focusing, and blurring, she stages the decorative as monumental, the lifeless as animate, and the mundane as peculiar. Her experiments with stop-motion animation evolve into sequences that embrace both duration and the material limits of painting. Likewise, her tapestry-making is a form of embodied time—a slow, repetitive gesture that contrasts with the immediacy of painting. The tactile nature of the woven surface brings physical closeness to themes of memory, each thread marking presence, care, and continuity.

Across these mediums, a tension emerges between preservation and erasure. Elkalaawy often reworks older canvases or incorporates fragments from unfinished or discarded works, embracing veiled layers of pentimento and loose brushwork that flirt with abstraction while retaining figuration. In doing so, she conjures images that hover between past and present, the remembered and the forgotten, the visible and the hidden. Positioning painting as a mode of timeless world-building, Elkalaawy breaks from realism to generate visual spaces where memory is both revealed and withheld.

NADA ELKALAAWY (b. 1995) is an Egyptian artist living and working in London and Cairo. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art (2018) and a BA in Fine Art from Kingston University (2016). Her solo exhibitions include Matt Carey-Williams, London (2025); Gypsum, Cairo (2025); Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2023); and Galerie DuflonRacz, Bern (2021). Her work has been included in group exhibitions and festivals at Condo, London (2025): Workplace, London (2025); Dajun Gallery, Taiwan (2025): Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong (2024); The Africa Centre, London (2024); Half Gallery, New York (2023);  Marlborough Gallery, London (2022); Kino der Kunst, Munich (2020); Southwark Park Galleries, London (2020); Sharjah Art Gallery, Cairo (2019); and the Nahim Isaias Museum, Guayaquil (2017). Elkalaawy has participated in residencies with Pro Helvetia, Montresso Art Foundation, and L’appartement 22. She has been shortlisted for numerous prizes including the Sainsbury Scholarship at the British School at Rome, the ACS Studio Prize, the Contemporary British Painting Prize, the Dentons Art Prize, and the Sarabande Emerging Art Fund. Her work is included in the X Museum collection, Beijing, Soho House collection, London and private collections worldwide. She is a co-founder of the artist group K-oh-llective.