An enrapturing exhibition entitled, The Contemporary Art Group (1946) was inaugurated at Al Masar gallery on 16 October featuring the works of its founder Hussein Youssef Amin, and members: Abdel-Hadi Al-Gazzar, Salim Al-Habaschi known asMogli, Mahmoud Khalil, Samir Rafi, Maher Raif and William Morcous. The exhibition features paintings and drawings that date back from 1939 to 1963, many being exhibited for the first time. The show also celebrates exhibiting the works of the Contemporary Art Group at Pompidou Centre Museum in Paris on 19October among the strong collection of the international touring exhibition titled, Art and Liberty, Rapture, war and Surrealism in Egypt (1938-1948). Al Masar has loaned 11 paintings by four of the gallery's late artists of the Contemporary Art Group which Al Masar has curated and exhibited their works in 2010 at a historical exhibition titled, Remembered. After the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the exhibition will travel to the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain and the Tate Liverpool in England, between 2017 and 2018. Art and Liberty, Rapture, war and Surrealism in Egypt (1938-1948)is the first exhibition devoted to the group known as Art and Liberty, a constellation of Cairo-based artists and writers formed in the 1930s and 1940s. Founded in 1938, the group provided a young generation of artists, intellectuals and activists with a mixed platform for promoting numerous cultural and political reforms. Many of these works are shown for the first time. By assembling these works and this corpus crucial to understanding the Surrealist paradigm in all its complexity, this historic exhibition outlines an overall vision of the Art and Liberty group, one of whose figureheads was the Egyptian writer, poet and journalist Georges Henein (1914-1973). On the sidelines of the exhibition, an international seminar entitled “Art et Liberté (1938-1948) and Modernity in Egypt: Beyond the Postcolonial Discourse” will be held on 25 November at the Pompidou Centre. The exhibition will continue through 17 November
