Four years ago, when I entered my fifties, I remember feeling appalled by the idea that I was growing old. Me 50? How come? I still feel young. The child in me is still alive and well.
I started to question my feelings about getting old. Our (...)
Entitled "Barah", meaning "room" or "space", the new exhibition by Abdel-Aziz Al-Guindi – held at the Al-Bab space on the Opera House grounds – includes 33 mixed media paintings. One of Fine Arts School's most popular professors, Al-Guindi was born (...)
The coronavirus pandemic has brought the mask back into the public sphere, and in Pandemic by Mohamed Bassiouny at the Easel and Camera Gallery in 6 October, 50 paintings and sketches in different sizes explore the phenomenon. Huge paintings showing (...)
Cairo has been depicted by no end of artists in as many ways. Celebrated figures such as Mohamed Abla, Salah Anani and Omar Elfayoumi variously target Islamic Cairo, working-class neighbourhoods and street scenes.
In his new exhibition of 55 acrylic (...)
Illustration is a unique and versatile form. It occupies a space between drawing and painting and connects the publishing industry with the plastic arts. In Egypt, illustrators seem to be on the rise thanks to a growing publishing industry.
Bassent (...)
Of the end-of-season experiments creeping into exhibition spaces, painter Mohamed Abla's 65 bronze sculptures at the Access Art Gallery in Downtown are among the most poignant. As I walked in I was thrilled to meet these differently sized, variously (...)
"Harvest Season" (13-21 March) is one of this season's most remarkable painting exhibitions. Held at the Nile Gallery in Zamalek, it depicts the unique landscape of the New Valley using a new technique.
A 2003 graduate of the Faculty of Art (...)
As a child, drawing, reading comic books and magazines and writing had all developed at the same time at a similar pace and in similar ways. I must've benefited from the beautiful landscape and complete silence in Benghazi, where I lived for 11 (...)
Closing today, Nihal Wahby's exhibition, Floating Hope, which took place at Karim Francis Gallery in Downtown, offers a new take on the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, focusing on the tears Isis shed when Seth killed Osiris, which made the (...)
Reunion is the title of an exhibition by the brilliant painter and sculptor Mohamed Sabry, one of the most distinguished artists based in Alexandria.
Held at the ZagPick gallery in Sheikh Zayed, the exhibition featured, as well as sculptures, many (...)
The new, untitled collection of 18 oil paintings by leading artist Samir Fouad deals with Scheherazade and the stories she tells in The Thousand and One Nights. Once again Fouad manages to provoke both the mind and the imagination, forcing this (...)
The 13th Luxor International Painting Symposium (LIPS, 3-17 December) closed in the buildup to New Year's Eve, the perfect time to go to Luxor. The 10-hour train journey had been hectic but the participating artists' warm reception more than made up (...)
A new season of exhibitions is offering some brilliant fare in the wake of the lockdown. Within one week, over ten shows opened in Zamalek, including the second round of the annual group exhibition of caricature at the Ubuntu Gallery (6 December-2 (...)
While human immigrants may or may not return to their home countries, the journey back is an essential part of a migratory bird's short life. In his new exhibition of 23 mixed-media paintings and one installation, “The Return” (8-23 November at the (...)
The Easel & Camera Gallery's outdoor group exhibition “Out Loud”, which opened on the golf grounds of the Hilton Dreamland Hotel just outside Cairo on 16 October, challenges the idea of sculptures as fixed and mute objects, allowing 150 pieces by 25 (...)
Titled “An Egyptian Vision”, Hany Rizq's recent exhibition at the Picasso Gallery (which closed on 18 October) features a relaxing, monochromatic palette and a dreamy feel. In large, 120 cm by 120 cm landscape-cum-folk paintings, Rizq pursues a (...)
When I heard about “Untamed Bodies”, the established artist Weaam El-Masry's new solo exhibition, I expected her trademark detailed human anatomy. I was in for a big surprise.
Closing on 24 October, the exhibition at Misr Gallery in Zamalek is a (...)
Omar Gabr is the youngest artist I have ever met, having noticed his work at two group exhibitions at the Ubuntu Art Gallery in Zamalek.
Born in 1999 to a working-class family in the densely populated Cairo suburb of Shubra Al-Khaima, Gabr was (...)
Pandemics have influenced artists, notably in Europe, throughout history: the Black Death, for example, figures in Michael Wolgemut's famous image of prancing skeletons, The Dance of Death (1493). In the Middle Ages artists and writers could take (...)
My introduction to Sarah El Samman took place through a group exhibition at the Ubuntu Gallery a few years ago. Exquisite pieces, they depicted the simplest scenes – a cat on a fence, for example – in a fascinating way.
Afterwards, I looked for the (...)
The Holy Family's flight through Egypt at the start of the first century AD has continually inspired artists and events, including the annual Journey of the Holy Family to Egypt – founded and curatwed by artist Chadi Adib Salama – which in its fifth (...)
Quarantine is all boredom and distress, but this need not be the case for artists who work in isolation anyway. One Facebook initiative, Stay Home: Draw Home, endeavours to remind people of thus fact, encouraging professionals and amateurs to use (...)
The death of the great sculptor Adam Henein at the age of 91 on 22 May turned social media into a memorial space, with artists and art lovers expressing their love and respect for the rock sculptor and painter who fused ancient Egyptian and modern (...)
Caricature has existed in Egypt for nearly a century now, writes Rania Khallaf, with cartoonists such as Sarokhan and Mohamed Rakha establishing the form. Since the Arab Spring a generation of cartoonists has also emerged in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and (...)
Pop art pioneer Reda Abdel-Salam is an illustrator, painter, critic, and professor of mural art at the Faculty of Fine Arts, from where he graduated in 1977. For 30 years he was an illustrator for Al-Ahram and Al-Musawwar, creating images for work (...)