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Born in Syria and raised in Sweden, Yosef’s journey as an artist has been one of perpetual evolution. He studied fine arts at the Pernby School of Painting in Stockholm before earning a bachelor’s degree at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, one of Sweden’s most esteemed art institutions. His pursuit of artistic refinement then led him to London, where he completed his Master’s in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. It was there that he solidified his conceptual and material approach to painting.
Yosef’s work is never static. It exists in the in-between, in motion, much like the artist himself. “I want them to constantly pan or to move,” he describes his paintings. “You’re looking effectively at just a frame of something that is being told.”
That sense of movement extends beyond form. “In my work, there’s always, in a very healthy way, a friction of being too much or being too little, or being too loud or being too silent. I think this also shows in [my] two very distinct cultures—like a very warm, loud, colourful Arab. The marriage of these two, looking back at it now more, has been a very healthy and long relationship.”
At the core of Yosef’s practice is an act of deconstruction. He has long engaged with what he calls a “blank canvas complex,” reconfiguring traditional materials in an attempt to defy permanence. “The blank canvas complex has been like my identity since I was 19,” he tells me. “It really started with this gentle fear of looking at a stretched-up blank canvas and this pressure of making art. It wasn’t about painting. It was about making something that effectively would have an impact, something that would last a few hundred years. It was a genuine pressure complex I had to train my mind away from.”
To confront that fear, he avoided the canvas entirely. Instead, he worked with materials that were never meant to last. Oil paint on architect’s paper, for instance, knowing that in a decade, the oil would seep through and consume the material. The impermanence liberated him. Art that would not survive became art that felt alive, imbued with fleeting urgency.
But then, he experimented with the opposite, plexiglass. A material so durable that, when combined with fixatives, it could last indefinitely. “That was the perfect middle ground for me: working on something ‘unholy’ like plastic while still using a ‘holy’ medium like oil paint.”
It took nearly a decade of working with ephemeral materials before he felt ready to confront the canvas again. But even then, his approach was one of disassembly. “I got the stretcher bars, I stretched the canvas, and then I immediately deconstructed the canvas. I did family portraits and self-portraits. Within the same breath, I also deconstructed these paintings, which effectively led to my Object series. But that was also a continuation of the play of this fear of starting something big, or starting a new art piece. It’s funny how it also became a part of my identity and a huge part of my practice.”
His work, often characterised by its use of white, plays with the tension between absence and presence. The colour isn’t vibrant, yet the painting feels saturated. It leaves space for the viewer to step inside. “It’s what’s purposely painted white,” he explains. “In the Object series—where the canvases are being pulled down—I paint with certain mediums and oils that will maintain a super glossy finish when the white dries. It kind of imitates this wetness.”
“So it’s a play of this super shiny-looking white, and this crumbled object that you as an observer will ask, ‘Can I touch this? Is this dry? Is it wet? What is it?’ There’s also an art of seduction in it, where it plays with the idea of ‘you can see but you can never touch.’”
He is now working on a monograph spanning 15 years of his career, published by Baron Books and set for release in May 2025. The process has been an exercise in self-reflection. “It’s reassuring to look back at your work and realise that there’s a strong narrative that’s been consistent. You haven’t really strayed from it. I think that’s very reassuring as an artist because you also realise that your practice isn’t just five or ten years old, or even twenty. Your practice will effectively be seventy years old, as long as I live. And within that span, you see a sense of consistency that gives you confidence and almost feels like a calling.”
Working on the monograph came at a time when he had taken deliberate steps over the last year away from working on gallery exhibitions and collaborations, retreating solo instead into his studio. “It’s been an amazing past year and a half of just painting for painting’s sake. Not angling it for this museum or this show or this gallery. It’s been a very nurturing time creatively to have worked this way.”
Among his recent works is Vital Sands, a three-part sculpture created for Forever is Now at Art D’Égypte. The piece mirrors the three Giza pyramids but takes the form of Yosef’s own face; his iconic cleft chin, lips, and Arab nose. “This is a space where there are these shrines and pyramids meant for gods and kings, but what I wanted to do was democratise this area. Not to only project these holy and royal figures, but to also project the actual everyday artist that is making this sculpture.”
Some of his earlier works also carried political weight. In 2018, he painted a series of portraits of Hafez al-Assad, the late Syrian dictator, on his signature stretched and crumpled canvases. The pieces were part of a series exploring fallen ideals and figures, inspired by Yosef’s last visit to Syria at the age of 13, when Hafez’s face was inescapable, watching over barbershops, classrooms, and public spaces in a display of authoritarian omnipresence. After Hafez’s death in 2000, his son Bashar assumed power and followed in his dad’s footsteps, plastering his own images across the country in a distinctly Orwellian fashion, embedding his Big Brother presence deep into the collective psyche of the Syrian people.
Fast forward to December 8, 2024: the fall of Bashar al-Assad. As the decades-long tyranny came to an end, crowds poured into the streets, tearing down his countless portraits, setting them ablaze, and shredding them to pieces. A final, cathartic rejection of his suffocating rule.
That very night, I sent Yosef a photo posted by a friend in Damascus, of a crumbled image of Bashar. That photo was eerily reminiscent of Jwan’s work in a life-imitates-art moment. “It’s one of my strongest memories of when this revolution unfolded—you sending me this photo of this pull-down and ripped image,” he tells me, smiling. “I had even felt like there was no place for [the Hafez paintings]. I still have this work. It wasn’t the kind of work that people were rushing to collect. Or that museums were eager to show. So when the events unfolded in Syria this year, I felt a sense of completion. The images we all saw, of destroyed posters and portraits, are effectively real life imitating art and vice versa. I felt very accomplished, if anything.
For Jwan, that dance between art and reality isn’t just about creation. It’s about connection. “I don’t make art for myself, I make art for an audience. And I think art that isn’t seen is completely worthless or useless. I make art as a dialogue, and what’s a dialogue if it’s not perceived by another person or an audience? One of the main purposes of doing what I do is to offer a dialogue. If the dialogue resonates or not, that is up to the observer. Some people will just pass it and not at all resonate, and some people will stop and stare and never forget it. I think this is one of the most important things we do, is to offer this platform. I think this is one of the main purposes of making art, is that it’s a language that speaks outside of our bodily functions.”
WORDS: Sami Abd Elbaki
