CAIRO: Salah Taher's art collection is exhibited in the occasion of his 100-year anniversary in Zamalek Art Gallery. In a simple gallery space with white walls, Taher's artworks are all cased in gold frames hung at eye level. The plain white walls accentuate the colors and texture of the paintings that depict local scenes in styles that range from classic and romanticism to abstract and contemporary. Even with the difference from each art piece to the next, each of Taher's pieces is bold and daring. Salah Taher was a prominent artist in Egypt. He was head of the Museum of Modern Arts in the 1960s, head of the Opera Cairo House in 1962 and joined Al-Ahram newspaper in 1966 as an artistic consultant. He won several awards, including the Guggenheim Award in 1961, and was honored alongside Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz in 2001 during the soft opening of the Library of Alexandra, where a book of Taher's work was published. The exhibition in the Zamalek Art Gallery showcased only a small percentage of Taher's thousands of art pieces on occasion of his 100-year anniversary. He died in February 2007 and his son, Ayman Taher, organized the exhibition to commemorate his father's life as an artist, a thinker and a member of society. Taher's works are almost all mixed media on paper, depicting local life with intimate figures and spacious landscapes, with strong bold lines and high contrast. It is clear to see why his artwork is celebrated.
