Hisham Echafaki

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 taxi...

Self-taught in art