Cairo Dwek

About

CAIRO DWEK (b.1998)

Biography

Cairo Dwek gained a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University London in 2023, and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2025.

She has become recognised for her expansive canvases, and their interplay of scale and minute detail. Her work is held in many private collections, and includes a collaboration with Disney.

Recent exhibitions include Fragments Of Reality at Vin Vin Gallery, Vienna, Austria (group show, 2025), Gallery LVS, Seoul, South Korea (group show, 2025), Fragments, The Art Reporter, at The John Lennon House, LA, USA, (group show, 2024), Light Of Winter, Perrotin Gallery, New York, USA (group show, 2024), and All Blues, The Art Reporter, at Invisible Dynamics, LA, USA (group show, 2024).

Artist Statement, June 2025

My paintings explore the metaphorical potential of motifs such as waves, fire, tunnels, speed or movement, to express a layered interpretation of themes such as temporality, digital experience, or fear and desire. As they do so, they shift ambiguously between abstraction and figuration. I use the dispersion and converging of dots to create forms. My technique alludes 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 the idyllic scenes I depict. I want to recreate the feeling of a floor giving way beneath our feet, of a moments doubt or uncertainty, of digital veils falling away to reveal reality.

At their heart, my work proposes we are an imperfect ‘part of’ everything, rather than an ideal presented ‘apart from’ all else. My paintings ask for a viewer to ‘step in and out’. This request acknowledges the influence of Op art artists such as Bridget Riley and their use of scale, repetition, and rhythm. Unlike my previous abstractions, which were harmonious in their rhythms and compositional elements, recent paintings show a clash of curves and straight lines, with more than one momentum present. I am seeking a combination of the illusion of movement and stillness, and an embodiment of the importance of time in my work and process. The relationship between my subject matter, and the slow process of making and viewing inherent in painting, is now more central to my art practice. The visceral, raw quality of speed and movement feels at odds with the secondary, screen-based quality of modern life. My semi-abstract forms are infused with a sense of jeopardy – of falling into the void of exposure or entrapment. I see my paintings as personal, intimate interpretations of the abstracted, universal and grandiose. I am looking for a poetic, layered encounter that directs the viewer but leaves room for interpretation.