Ghadah Alkandari is an artist living and working in Kuwait, born in India in 1969 with a BA in Mass Communications from the American University in Cairo (1992). It was her six-week painting course at the School of Visual Arts in New York that shaped her current style, which was also influenced early on by both classical painters: Cezanne, Matisse, Modigliani and Klimt, and comic books: Mad Magazine and Asterix. Her work ranges from large-scale acrylic portraits to smaller, more intimate pen and ink drawings. Her paintings are primarily figurative, exploring the wide spectrum of human emotion and familial complexities. Whereas her paintings are visceral and highly personal, her sketchbook drawings are more detached and focus on everyday happenings with a twist. Alkandari has had numerous solo and group exhibitions locally and internationally. In 2014, she completed a residency and two-month exhibition at Doha’s Mathaf Museum’s Project Space.
