This week the funeral of Abdel-Hadi Al-Weshahi, professor of sculpture at the Fine Arts College, took place on the Opera House grounds in the presence of Minister of Culture Saber Arab, Opera Director Ines Abdel-Dayem, Helwan University President Yasser Sakr as well as many artists, colleagues and students of Al-Weshahi. Al-Weshahi's first contributions to Egyptian art took place in 1959, and from then on he exhibited widely, receiving many honours including the State Incentive and Merit prizes and the Science and Art Medal; museums around the world have acquired his work, which is characterised by personality of style and versatility of medium. Critics all over the world recognised the spirit of ancient Egyptian and occasionally Greek sculpture in the forms he created; they praised his approach to mass, which was thought to be direct and uncompromising, as well as the expressive power of his thoroughly modern approach to art. Al-Weshahi focussed on the human figure in nearly all his works, though he very seldom attempted verisimilitude. He would reduce the size of the limbs and the head, making the broad sail-like torso dominate each piece, and thereby facilitating its dialogue with the surrounding space. He also used layering techniques to achieve the same effect, producing skeletal figures of immense power. “Sculpture is my life,” Al-Weshahi is known to have said, “and I practise the art of sculpture in order to preserve my humanity.” His works often come across as the very distillation of his sense of being and his connection not only with humanity but also with the universe as a whole. He never stopped experimenting. Yet these works are not without emotion, and Al-Weshahi's mastery of capturing light within a piece or conversing with it on a surface was remarkable. By moulding flowing curves into the material he could give an impression of great anxiety, or freedom. It would seem as though the figure or its movement was racing the light, reflecting the mental whirlwinds contained within human existence. He could be almost cubist in his expressive gusto, and the sense of confusion brought about by the viewer's inability to tell what a particular piece conveys or represents would always enrich the experience. At the Venice Biennale in 1980, Al-Weshahi was not content with presenting an old sculpture which now stands at the Cairo Opera House entrance (since he could not complete a new work in the two months he had before he was due to leave), so he offered — in addition, and at his own expense — a pioneering performance art piece on 21st-century humanity in the presence of the Egyptian artists Omar Al-Nagdi, the late Hamed Nada, Menatallah Helmi and others. “The idea developed in my head,” he recalled, “and so I took along a cage in which I placed a chair and two glass cubes. I sat on the chair and placed on the cubes various implements of contemporary life as well as signs in several languages saying “No Entry”, “No Waiting”, “No Exit”. This was opposite the sculpture at a distance of nine metres, and connected to it by hand and foot prints in red. The piece was accompanied by Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) interwoven with randomly recorded sounds of the Egyptian street.” Though a very successful and at the time unprecedented innovation, Al-Weshahi's performance piece was completely ignored in Egypt, which perhaps discouraged Al-Weshahi from repeating the experiment. Yet both before and after his performance piece, the emissary of Arab sculpture as he came to be known put up a remarkable fight with the 21st century and with his own terminal illness, leaving behind not only a wealth of valuable art but an enduring challenge and a statement against all that takes away from our humanity and our sense of the universe. Nagwa Al-Ashri
