Sarah Abdeen-Cairo
The second season of the "Innovators of Khaledoun" exhibition opened in Cairo on Saturday evening, which will run until September 28th.
The exhibition includes a large group of pioneers of contemporary Egyptian plastic art, who have had a significant impact in enriching the Egyptian plastic movement, such as: Abdel Aziz Darwish and Kamel El Deeb, Omar Najdi and Ezzat Ibrahim and Ghoul Ahmed and Gamal Kamal, in addition to the presence of caricatures represented in Sants Abu Cartoons Egyptian, and Tougan Hijazi, Mustafa Hussein, as well as sculpture represented in Abdel Badie Abdel Hay, Mohamed Hagras, Hamdi Jabr and Jaber Hijazi.
Egyptian artist and critic Ezz El-Din Naguib said in a statement to Al-Jazeera Net that "the exhibition is an attempt to monitor Egyptian art and continue to document, a diverse exhibition between painting, photography, sculpture and ceramics, in which generations vary between the fifties and eighties, which makes us in front of a panoramic painting of the Egyptian plastic movement, various generations and schools Without prejudice to the type or artistic direction, without prejudice to some artistic methods that achieve practical purposes, and are widespread and accepted by ordinary audiences, through the covers of books or the press.
"Artistic memory may be shaped by critical writings and academic messages, but it does not accumulate real experience, such as watching and highlighting artworks, a role that Egyptian museums should play, rather than accumulating art in stores," he said.
The most important artists of the exhibition
Artist Sami Rafeh: Rafeh appeared in the plastic movement in the mid-forties, and disappeared quickly in the early fifties, leaving a huge impact, where he was at the forefront of the artists who led the ideas and feelings of young people in the years of anger and rebellion and the desire for change after the Second World War until 1952.
His work is one of the classics of modern Egyptian art, and represents the next movement of the generation of pioneers, and his paintings produced in his youth are still resilient to the imagination and raise questions and draw the attention of the masses.
Artist Omar Najdi: The journey of the artist Omar Najdi began to respect the traditions of academic study, especially after graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1953, and then he joined the Faculty of Applied Arts and graduated from it in 1957.
Al-Najdi then went on to a horizon full of expression and abstraction, where he left different creations ranging from photography, sculpture and ceramics, and his work witnessed a mixture of symbols and icons of different Egyptian civilizations, in addition to his interest in expressing humanitarian issues and the struggle against forms of injustice and racism through his paintings.
Sculptor Abdel-Badi Abdel-Hay: Abdel-Hay started sculpting in a primitive and innate manner with the Aswan clay, when he worked as a casting professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Then began to choose more difficult and hard materials such as granite, limestone and basalt. Abdel Hay has carved a big name for himself with the pioneers of modern Egyptian sculpture such as Gamal Sigini and Mahmoud Mokhtar.
He began by making small clay figurines for the soldiers, where he wanted to join the recruitment. When he was known for the Mahmoud Mukhtar Sculpture Competition, he decided to participate. Abdel Hay made a statue of a girl combing her hair, and won the first prize in the competition, and continued to receive the first prize in the same competition for Snoot. For 50 years, Abdel Hay presented hundreds of sculptures with pure Egyptian features.
The cartoonist Ahmed Tougan: Tougan's style was characterized by attention to detail, and a careful examination of many human models and vocabulary circulating in the tongues of people in the streets, houses, cafes and factories.
Through the caricature, Tugan monitored social changes, the change in linguistic vocabulary, and through the art of caricature, always supported the issues of the vulnerable, fought against colonialism and Zionism, and knew as a nationalist Arab artist, who used painting as a means of communicating his ideas, attitudes and convictions.
Artist Abdel Aziz Darwish: Darwish is a third generation artist in the modern Egyptian art movement, although he is a contemporary of the confusion of the plastic movement, he chose his own style away from the influence of Cezanne, which he drinks from his Armenian teacher "Grabidian".
Always retain the influential lyrical touches without abandoning the depth and third dimension, nor slipping in the formal or chromatic flattening.