"Masked" Painting

Hisham Echafaki is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist working across painting in oil, acrylic and resin to explore the intricate beauty of the natural world and humanity's shifting relationship to it. Merging surrealism with classical technique, his work gives animal subjects, many of them endangered species, a haunting sentience: creatures rendered with such precision and painterly depth that they seem to hold a gaze, a memory, an emotion.

Rather than depicting animals as passive subjects of observation, Hisham imbues them with interior life and imaginary narrative, inviting viewers to question where the boundary between human and animal experience really lies and what it means to share a planet whose balance we are are actively reshaping. Beneath the surrealist composition, runs a sustained environmental message. His chosen fauna and flora subjects are under pressure from habitat and biodiversity loss, climate change, overexplotation of natural resources and the accelerating spread of urbanisation that carry the weight of ecosystems in visible decline.

Through anthropomorphism and trompe-l'œil, his animals take on human gestures and an uncanny, lifelike presence, his paintings on Perspex and resin often reading as faux taxidermy, specimens so convincing they seem to be, or once have been, real. The result is work that is at once visually arresting and intellectually resonant, pieces that reward close looking while carrying a deeper ecological charge. Beneath the technical virtuosity lies a consistent inquiry: how do we see ourselves in relation to the natural world, and what responsibility does that relationship demand of us?

Since 2012, Hisham has exhibited internationally across galleries and leading art fairs including The Affordable Art Fair and The other Art Fair with Saatchi Art in London, Los Angeles and Bristol. His works are held in numerous private and public collections.. Through each new body of work, he continues to craft a distinctive artistic voice, one that merges technical mastery with environmental consciousness, inviting viewers to reconsider what they owe the natural world.