Simply entitled Botanic Meditation, an exhibition of work by the celebrated senior artist Adam Henein and the young, 1990s-generation artist Essam Darwish is ongoing in the Ufuq 1 Gallery at the Mahmoud Khalil Museum. A unique experience, the exhibition immediately invites the viewer to switch on their meditative capacity. The parallel banners in which the work is introduced in the artists' own words amply spell that out. “As a child,” Henein writes, “I used to lie down on the grass and let it touch my face, and my whole body. There I always felt safe and peaceful, as if I were in my mother's womb. It is a world that can only be described by a painter... I used to stay in this position, observing different plants breathing under the scorching sun for many hours. I saw roots penetrating the surface of the earth, and watched small leaves creeping towards the light...” Darwish's approach is rather more conceptual, referring to the Prophet Joseph and Pharaoh's Seven Lean Years as his inspiration: “Ancient Egyptians learned how to sow and harvest. With knowledge and unity they succeeded in storing up the grains and crops in times of prosperity. It was a pioneering experience in human history... The creativity of Egyptians continued and they managed to solve the problem of Nile drought till our modern era,” the banner reads. However touching you find the artists' words, they will soon vapourise before the power of the art. Dozens of drawings that date back to the 1960s and 1970s by Henein — who is best known as a stone sculptor — surround Darwish's abstract sculptures. One interesting thing in common is that, while Darwish's work is the start of his career, Henein's paintings embody the start of his work in this genre. Many are in graphite, some in pastel or aquarelle. But whether or not they show colour and whether or not the more complete of them can be seen as paintings rather than sketches, these are spontaneous studies of flora by a plant lover, often accompanied by hand-written notes on the margin of the page. But one collection of 17 small water colours is amazing; they are a mix of tiny, previously unseen shapes: geometrical life forms inspired by plants. The beautiful all-white sculptures in the middle of the hall, with their undetermined shapes, are an invitation to free your imagination. A step back reveals a scene closely reminiscent of the white desert: white rocks in endless, unpredictable shapes, surrounded by the possibility of plants raised above them seemingly at random. They are actually massively amplified versions of various grains, their size reflecting the importance and value of those substances. “While walking on the streets in Aswan, I found wheat, lentils, beans and other crops that Egyptians cultivated. I picked some, and started to touch the tiny grains, to contemplate their solid form and abstract shape. They are a clear manifestation of the Creator,” the banner reads. For Darwish, the grains are an equivalent of abstraction, since the meaning of existence resides in expressing the energy and vitality of life. “This is the abstract concept which the sculptor always tries to reach: attempting to infuse in his sculptures a unique spirit, so that they continue to exist.” Smaller granite grains are dispersed on one low table, as if they are being planted in the soil. Gypsum grains with long sprouting necks in one corner look like swans on a lake surface, others like one-legged giraffes. The impression of being on a national-part safari was intensified beyond belief. As part of the progression of his (also heavily ancient Egypt-inspired) career path, Henein developed a technique of painting on papyrus using natural pigments. Flora had influenced his sculptures, and both flora and rock formations influence — for example — the small 1974 work “Picnic in the Garden”, in which abstract leafless trees communicate a unique spirit of strength and vitality. Since his graduation from the Fine Art College in 1953, Henein has spent significant stretches of his time in Upper Egypt, first in Luxor and more recently (as the founder and commissar of the Aswan Sculpture Symposium) in Aswan. Born in 1929, it took him until the 1980s to start working in stone. He divided the intervening time between Upper Egypt and Europe, spending as much time travelling to see works of art (notably in Mexico) as in Cairo.
