The Saudi international artist Shalimar Sharbatly has a renowned fame in the world of fine art after she succeeded in securing a respected place for her artistic creations in many international museums and exhibitions such as the French Louvre. However, Shalimar’s most important characteristic as an artist is her ability to create different innovative artistic spaces by creating color components, this is known as the “moving art” which she created herself with the aim of making art a way of life, bringing the paintings hung on walls into the living spaces to raise the general taste of individuals and add aesthetic touches and elevate the visual experience.
From an early age, the colors of the world were painted in her eyes, and she formed a visual sense that made her jump quickly into the world of human maturity. As a child, Shalimar Sharbatly watched her mother’s fingers hold a feather, and as a teen she became famous on the cover of the Egyptian “Sabah Al-Khair” magazine. She says, “I am a painter, and the painter plays with history,” adding that the fame of her husband, the great Egyptian director Khaled Youssef, added to her fame, not to her art. Shalimar has been ranked among the 100 most influential women in arts and culture but considers her evaluation as a human being more important than any ranking.
Her murals decorated the city of Jeddah, Bride of the Red Sea, from 2005 to 2007 and her painted cars decorated the streets of Jeddah in colors. Shalimar is proud to have painted for Andrea Bocelli Charitable Foundation on an old Ferrari car that was sold at a fantastic price in an auction opened by Queen Rania, and to have hand-painted a Formula car chosen by the company “Boss” to enter the race, and before that she painted on a Porsche car that was shown at the entrance to the Louvre Museum in a precedent that is the first of its kind, her works were shown there four times after. She is the only Arab artist whose work was chosen by the Negresco Hotel, which is one of the oldest and most luxurious hotels in the French city of Nice, for an innovative car designed by her, to be displayed in the center of the hotel’s main lobby, which includes a rare collection of the most important artists of the world, including Michelangelo, Raffaele Sanzio, Ronaldo da Vinci, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso.
Shalimar Sharbatly is always proud of the international recognition she has achieved for the Saudi artistic movement when she won the first honorary prize (the Grandson of Retoire Award) at the Autumn Salon in its 106th session in the presence of a group of world artists and critics, led by the French Minister of Culture, the Ambassador of Spain in France, and 500 of the world’s most famous artists from 35 countries.
Shalimar Sharbatly is the Goodwill Ambassador and Montmartre of the French Arts Quarter and its famous square “Tartre”. The square of artists and painters in which Picasso passed with Van Gogh before him and many after them. The pioneer of “moving art” that moves the museum to the street, held two exhibitions after she was presented a feather of Salvador Dali to paint with in honor of her art by the painter Juan Ramiz. Sharbatly says, “A painter has the right to set his eye on the world, but it will not be granted to him if he does not deserve it.” Shalimar won the Matisse Prize, and her painting was hung on a building bearing the signature of Zaha Hadid at Oxford University, but her most beloved work remains an exhibition she held in Cairo, in which she transformed the poems of the poet Farouk Gweida into paintings and was opened by the great poet Farouk Gweida and the international artist Salah Taher themselves, the exhibition was the talk of the Arab and international press.