1952–present
Wafika Sultan Al-Essa
Wafika Sultan Al-Essa, a Qatari artist, went to Egypt in the early 1970s on a government scholarship to study and returned as one of the first women in her country with a professional art education. Her paintings are often titled after lines of folk songs and proverbs. Since 2011 her work has been shown at Mathaf, the museum in Doha.
Biography
In 1974 a graduate of Helwan University in Egypt received a bachelor’s degree in applied art. It was the result of studies for which Wafika Sultan Al-Essa had gone to Egypt on a scholarship from the Qatari government.
She was born in 1952 in Bahrain and is considered a Qatari artist. In those years Helwan University was still known as Cairo University. The scholarship gave her a professional education, which for a Qatari woman of that time was a rarity: she is described as one of the first in the country to study art and to practise it as a profession. She has taken part in local exhibitions since 1972, that is, while still a student. In 1976 her work was shown at the second exhibition of the Arab Artists’ Federation in Morocco, then at the fifth and sixth exhibitions of Arab artists in Kuwait. The Qatari art exhibitions of 1978 were held in Paris and London, and in 1979 in Tunis. Soon after the Qatari Fine Arts Society was founded in 1980 she joined it and took part in its exhibitions of 1981 and 1982. Her work was also included in the official exhibitions that the emir of Qatar organised abroad.
Al-Essa’s painting draws on Qatari folklore and the natural history of the country. Her paintings are usually titled after folk songs and proverbs, and some of them carry a theme of mutual support, of symbiosis. The influence of Islamic art can be seen in her calligraphic works. In her first years, it is noted, her interest in the plastic arts was hampered by the attitude of the conservative part of Qatari society toward this form of art.
In 2011 her work was shown at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. Of the 23 participants in that exhibition only two were Qatari women, and she was one of them. Her works later went on permanent display in the museum. In 2014 she received the Arab Woman Awards prize as best Qatari artist. In 2020 she took part in the exhibition “Lived Forward: Art and Culture in Doha from 1960–2020” at the same museum, and in March 2022 her work was featured in the AIR 6 programme at the Fire Station in Doha.
Outside painting she worked as a production designer for Qatar TV and at the Qatari embassy in Cairo. She owns a private consultancy for architecture and design.
Profile notes