A sculpture made of wire? This is a completely different craft, a world of live creatures forged out of threaded metal. Galal Gomaa's was a new and interesting world to walk into, his work forming the cornerstone of this kind of art in Egypt. Seeing his recent exhibition at Art Corner was enough of an incentive to explore further, and it proved equally amazing to watch Gomaa work. It was like watching a magician breathe life into matter. A two-dimensional portrait would take him a mere few minutes to complete. He has this marvelous talent for assimilating people's features. Larger three-dimensional works require more time, but they entrance even further, like animal skeletons forming in his hands, with different thicknesses of wire summoning up lighter and heavier components. The original beauty of the objects and creatures comes through. “My talent manifested at a very early age. I have been making artworks since I was seven. The school helped me a great deal, supporting me with material.” Gomaa graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts' décor department in 1967, but was present on the art scene before his graduation. Despite his outstanding academic performance he refused to be appointed at the faculty as a teacher, because it was “difficult to continue as a creative artist while working with dull professors who, hating any competition, will readily suppress your talent”. Gamal El Segeny, the famous sculptor who pioneered the use of scrap iron, was Gomaa's first mentor. Gomaa worked for almost two decades as an interior designer, opening a private office to service major institutions. “Working in the field of interior design helped me to understand different materials: iron, glass, wood. Experimentingwith different styles, I fell in love with iron wires. Over so many years interior design has given me the skill required to translate my design into an exact, neat product, and this is what I do with my wire sculptures.” Gomaa started his career as a sculptor in the early 1980s. His first exhibition, at the French Cultural Centre in Mounira, was dedicated to stone sculptures. It proved a success. Stone was his medium of choice until he fell in love with wire. In 1999, he started to work on three-dimensional wire sculptures. He made a deer. It had a very simple shape. “I loved it and started making similar works. My first exhibition of wire sculptures was in Al-Sawi Culturewheel in 2005. It was followed by four annual exhibitions. The exhibits were sold out. It was a good sign: the audience liked my work. I was being welcomed into the art world,” he says proudly. “To excel at such an art you need to have a very rich imagination. To imagine in vacuum. It also requires you to study the anatomy of each animal you're planning to create, and I love to see animals live. I actually attended lectures at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, where I learned a lot about the anatomy of horses, their nature, and movement. It was very useful. For portraits, I spend long time contemplating the subject to memorize their features. But,” he giggles, “it takes me few minutes to finish the portrait itself.” In the course of his career, Gomaa made many two-dimensional wire portraits of key characters, including the late President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the Mahatma Gandhi, Fidel Castro and El Segeny. “I don't usually do sketches before I start sculpting. I count on my senses. I used to work in my own furniture factory. Sometimes, a large piece requires an even larger space and special equipment. But I am no longer working there anymore. I simply work from home. I've decided to allocate all my time to art, giving up my career in interior design in 2010. It was then that I started exhibiting at professional art galleries such as Qortoba, Art Corner, and Droub. Since then I've developed the habit of taking along some wire and the tools I need to work it wherever I go. Cheap wire can make fantastic art works, it opens up endless possibilities for experimentation. People might think it's easy: a stretch of wire and a wire clipper. A stress-free business, people might think. But, no,” Gomaa smiles. “It is not.” Interestingly, Gomaa's sculptures underwent a major development after the 25 January Revolution, his works were more in demand than ever. “The difference between traditional sculpture and wire sculpture is that in traditional sculpture, with stone or clay, you work on a block, you can see it, you are dealing with a block, while in wire sculpture you work in a vacuum, you're required to create the block, and yet you have to produce a three-dimensional sculpture. It is a kind of play or dialogue between mass and vacuum,” he explains. “I like the difficulty and challenging nature of it. Iron is a stubborn, strong material, and yet you can create gentle creatures out of it.” A brand new technique will be featured in his next exhibition, to take place by the end of the year at the Greek Campus Gallery, a new fine art outlet off Tahrir Square. It combines watercolour painting with wire sculpture, creating a magic dialogue between liquid and solid materials: a painted house surrounded by trees made of wire, or a painted animal outlined in wires… “It features an advanced stage of abstraction,” Gomaa says. “I'd never thought of colouring the wire, I'd I always wanted to preserve the nature of the original material.”
