NABIL SAOUABI

Born in 1972 in Jendouba, Tunisia. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts de Tunis, Nabil Saouabi earned his master’s degree in 2002 specializing in printmaking, which he later taught at the school, and his doctorate in 2013 in art science and techniques. For him, art is primarily an act of strong resistance and engagement in all directions. He is a multidisciplinary artist using a wide array of media (painting, printmaking, video, installation, etc.). Nevertheless, painting and printmaking remain by far his preferred techniques, those he favors above all others. His artistic universe, inspired by media or cinematic images, oscillates between the political and the poetic. His figures are often thrust into situations where they are left to themselves or trapped and suspended in a kind of dead time. It is a universe of ambiguity and uncertainty, reflecting existential concerns, between two shores: collective mythology and personal mythology.

Passionate, he navigates with agility and grace from one technique to another, from one process to another, in a dynamic of ever-renewed creation. He reconstructs a visual universe that stages the relationship of the human being between the present and the eternal. These images, whether political, ethnic, social, or even cinematic, function as a matrix in his work. All these elements help establish an act of liberating memories through staging or scenography in a dramatic narrative. Between sky and earth; between shadow and light; between the tragic and the comic; between the weighty eternity and the unbearable lightness of being, the act of creation unfolds as the ultimate journey.

In 2000, he held his first solo exhibition and since then has participated in numerous exhibitions in Tunisia and abroad, such as Dak’Art Beijing and the VI International Printmaking Biennale of Île-de-France, as well as international fairs: 1-54 Contemporary African Art in New York, Art Dubai, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Parallel Vienna. In 2014, Galerie El Marsa hosted his exhibition Sleeper(s) Awake, reflecting on the power of political images in a mise en scène and mise en abyme that theatricalizes autobiographical painting depicting the relationship between the painter and the world around him, particularly within his studio space.

His works are present in numerous private collections in Tunisia, Europe, and the Middle East, and are also part of the collections of the Tunisian Ministry of Culture.



︎ @saouabinabil

︎ nabilsaouabi.com