Nada Elkalaawy: A Stir of Echoes @ Matt Carey-Williams
This evening, Matt Carey-Williams at Porchester Place opens Nada Elkalaawy's solo exhibition, ‘Scene XIV: Nada Elkalaawy, A Stir of Echoes’. The ‘Scene’ explores memory, inheritance, and the shifting boundaries between truth and fiction. Elkalaawy constructs visual worlds where recollection collides with imagination, and familiar motifs take on new perspectives. Elkalaawy, born in Egypt and now based in London, holds an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK (2018) and a BA in Fine Art from Kingston University, London, UK (2016) before which she studied Architecture at Central Saint Martins, London, UK (2014).
Nada Elkalaawy, Night Watch, 2024-5. Oil on canvas, 168 x 122 cm (66 1/8 x 48 in). Photo courtesy: the artist and Matt Carey-Williams. © the artist. Photography by @showpickle.
The exhibition spans across the gallery’s two floors. Upon entering the warm, intimate space, visitors are immediately met by Night Watch, positioned directly opposite the doorway. The painting pulls you in instantly, its emotional depth, its shifting atmosphere, its multi-layered surface all working together to create a sense of déjà vu. Elkalaawy frequently paints over earlier works based off of photographs, allowing previous compositions to ghost beneath the surface, and Night Watch is a prominent example of this process. A new image, a vase of bright red poppies, delicate yet heavy with symbolism, has been laid upon an earlier portrait, and fragments of that hidden figure slowly reveal themselves the longer you look. Eyes emerge. A face takes form. The painting becomes less a still life and more a living threshold between past and present.
What first appears simple becomes wonderfully unstable. Elkalaawy’s layering technique transforms the canvas into an active image, where traces of what came before refuse to stay buried. The result creates a sense that the work is aware of you, that it is holding something just out of reach, that memory itself is shifting under the surface. It’s a captivating entry point, one that sets the tone for the dreamlike, emotionally charged journey that continues throughout the show.
Nada Elkalaawy, Faint Embers, 2025. Oil on canvas,168 x 214 cm (66 1/8 x 84 1/4 in). Photo courtesy: the artist and Matt Carey-Williams. © the artist. Photography by @showpickle.
To the right of this painting hangs a smaller, intimate portrait of the same woman, a close, personal study of her gazing toward her own obscured presence. Night Watcher is quietly confronting, yet the two gazes never fully meet, creating an intentional tension. This curatorial choice introduces a compelling dialogue between the works: proximity without resolution, recognition without certainty.
To the right of the entrance stands Faint Embers, a major work in the exhibition that deepens Elkalaawy’s exploration of layered memory. Faint Embers centres on a vivid bouquet of yellow and purple poppies, pushed boldly to the front of the canvas. Behind them, the faint face of a young boy flickers in and out of a hazy background, once a mosaic of an armchair, children at play, a school building, and palm trees, now dissolved into something memory-like. Warm tones of ochre and rust create a gentle burn beneath the surface, with the flowers rising from these ‘embers’ as a quiet memorial to the fragmented image below.
Nada Elkalaawy, A Summoning, 2025. Oil on canvas, 61 x 76 cm (24 x 29 7/8 in). Photo courtesy: the artist and Matt Carey-Williams. © the artist. Photography by @showpickle.
As you enter the downstairs of the gallery, the first painting you encounter is A Summoning. Elkalaawy uses warm pink and orange tones to highlight the glistening object at the forefront of the image, giving it an almost otherworldly glow. The artwork feels dreamlike as it begins to fade, revealing what lingers behind it: a constellation of blurred lights and faint, ghostlike faces that create an atmosphere both intimate and unsettling.
Also downstairs is Close Companions. What first appears to be a moody bouquet of dark, velvety roses slowly reveals a different origin story. Beneath the petals, Elkalaawy has painted over an earlier image of two ceramic cats. There’s an unmistakable edge to Close Companions. Even before you notice the cats, the painting feels slightly wrong in a way you can’t name, its palette too dark, its flowers too heavy, its silence a little too loud. When the feline eyes finally emerge from the bouquet, the mood sharpens: not frightening, but eerily intimate, as if something buried is quietly watching you back. It’s a subtle, unsettling beat in the exhibition, but one that makes it memorable.
Nada Elkalaawy, The Listener, 2025. Oil on canvas board, 60.3 x 30.3 cm (23 3/4 x 11 7/8 in). Photo courtesy: the artist and Matt Carey-Williams. © the artist. Photography by @showpickle.
The exhibition as a whole is quietly powerful, an unassuming presentation that gathers momentum the longer you stay with it. With only eleven of the sixteen new works on view, A Stir of Echoes offers a compelling insight into Elkalaawy’s wider practice. The paintings upstairs present submerged figures and dissolving still lifes; downstairs, the object-based works deepen into meditations on inheritance, attachment and the emotional weight that everyday items can carry long after their owners have passed.
Across each piece, Elkalaawy’s preoccupation with memory and grief is not presented as narrative but as atmosphere. Faces appear only to fade; objects maintain their shape but lose their clarity; colours shift from the natural to the uncanny as though passing through several emotional filters before settling on the surface. Her layering process—painting over earlier works, returning to motifs of poppies, putti, porcelain, and heirlooms—makes each canvas feel like a living document. Viewed together, the works map a journey through recollection, transformation, and the ache of what lingers. Elkalaawy doesn’t illustrate grief directly; instead, she captures its afterglow, the way a memory can haunt without warning, or how an object can hold more truth than its material form suggests. For her first solo exhibition in the UK since 2023, A Stir of Echoes feels remarkably resonant. It introduces an artist who understands the complexity of looking back and the quiet courage it takes to let the past bleed into the surface of the present.
You can view Scene XIV: Nada Elkalaawy, A Stir of Echoes from the 20th November 2025 until the 16th January 2026 at Matt Carey-Williams, 12 Porchester Place, W2 2BS.
Amelia Holdsworth
Reviews Co-Editor, MADE IN BED