Celebrating its 6th anniversary, Al-Masar gallery in Zamalek presents "Contemporary Visions", an annual group exhibition featuring a galaxy of artists. It showcases artworks, painting and sculpture, by pioneer and contemporary artists including among many others Hussein Youssef Amin (1904-1984). Amin has a leading role in the Egyptian art movement who called for establishing the group of the contemporary art in the mid 1940s. He called for starting from the beginning and for him contemporary art meant delving deeply into the ancient folk heritage and reviving Egypt's authentic values and traditions. He made a brilliant use of the folk motifs in his paintings. His initiative was very crucial as it helped in preserving the Egyptian identity of art in face of the invasion of the western trends and it was vehemently welcomed by a number of artists who were also adhering to their folk art and heritage. This requires to present a brief survey of the history of the contemporary art group that started strong from the very beginning and was officially announced in 1908, the date of establishing the School of Fine Art. The movement was very much associated with the strong national movement that prevailed then and that was concerned with the issue of the national independence and that resulted in producing a number of genius artists such as Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891-1934), Mohamed Nagui (1956-1988), Mahmoud Said (1897-1964), Ragheb Ayad (1892-1982) and Habib Georgi (1892-1965). The contemporary art group has produced two giants who possessed the extreme talent, the refine culture and the high performance: Abdel-Hadi Al-Gazzar and Hamed Nada who created Egyptian art characterized by the local and international touch both in form and content. Amin liberated Egyptian artists from blindly following European surrealism and delving deeply into the metaphysical meditations to focus more on their local and rich art heritage. The exhibition continues until 25 September.
