Vanitas et Venenum by Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed

Artwork Description

Original title of the artwork: Vanitas et Venenum

“Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed's drawings are at once a satire of her generation in Vienna and a study of the human condition, a painful moral comedy, with death as the anchoring motif. They are dense with incident and dense with allusion: to music, film, literature and art; to the Baroque and to Symbolism; to medicine, anatomy, the graphic arts and to contemporary popular culture. Vienna is between east and the west and genres meet there, a fact which further influences the work. Mohamed’s intelligence about the nature of drawing, and the apparent ease with which she draws, results in work that seems almost self-aware: this is an art of apperception, even while it is about other people’s lives, their ambiguous and unresolved stories.” - David Lillington (2017)