Osama Ehab

Osama Ehab (b. 2002) is an artist from the Cairo district of Sharabeya who paints in gold acrylic on printed photographs. He lives and works in Cairo. Most of the photographs are not his own. He finds them in web articles and social media posts about the Egyptian street. He marks each image with precise touches of gold and hangs it in a gilded frame. He also works in drawing and printmaking, notably monoprint.

For All That Glitters Is Not Gold (2026) he spent the better part of a year going through two decades of online images. The sixty-four works include a boy hanging upside down from the straps of a Metro car. In some he blots out faces with paint or water. The show also has twenty-three ceramic pieces made by the artist Omar El Gazar in collaboration with Ehab. They are replicas of discarded Crocs, soda cans and yoghurt cups, sprayed with gold paint. They stand on bases of cans that Ehab collected and compressed. His earlier solo show, أندل منفلة (2025), compared mechanical systems with the human psyche. It centred on his own motorcycle engines, which kept breaking down.

Ehab studied art education at Helwan University, Cairo. He has held two solo exhibitions at the Mashrabia Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cairo, in 2025 and 2026.