Mais al Azab

According to the infamous Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses, the legend of Pygmalion tells of a sculptor who fell in love with a perfected masterpiece statue of his own creation. It renders the story of an artist’s thirst for love, beauty and authentic artistic creation. In its Arabic rendition by the Egyptian playwright Tawfiq al Hakeem, the story takes a more complicated psychological twist as Pygmalion destroys the statue at the end. Inspired by Pygmalion’s internal turmoil and the struggle between idolized art and the flawed reality of life, Obsessive Inscriptions came as a collection of handwritten, ink drawings that veer between constrains of idealized geometrical orders and the beauty of subtle imperfections. Many of the drawings repeat in Arabic Pygmalion’s name or the following extract: ‘Tell me Narcissus, what’s more beautiful and what’s more noble, life or art?’.