Ahmed Morsi (Egypt, Born 1930) Untitled (Bull)
Provenance : [Timeline chronologique]
2018-01-01 | Property from a private collection, New York Acquired directly from the Artist by the present owner Exhibited: Aicon Gallery, New York, The Flying Poet, December 2018 – January 2019 Ahmed Morsi is an Egyptian artist, art critic and poet with a career that spans decades of creative output
[Propriété non datée]
- Drawing on his memories of his upbringing, Morsi employs a series of surrealist motifs that appear to take a dip in the metaphysical in his works
- In the 1950s, he simultaneously studied literature at Alexandria University and painting at the studio of Italian master Silvio Becchi
- In 1974, Morsi moved to New York City, where he continues to paint, write and critique from his Manhattan home
- His variously populated images seem to have origins in ancient Egyptian iconography – the sadness of his creatures derived by animating an ancient past with modern life
- He does this by assembling his compositions as a series of continuums between different planes
- The theatricality of his painted spaces is undeniable
- Ambitious visual plains, characters in varying degrees of definition and a sense of pathos, all pointing to a moor that exists out of time
- Having grown up in Alexandria, Egypt, Morsi was exposed to a cosmopolitan culture
- Visions of a fictive, invented Alexandria run through most of Morsi's work and his practice offers a powerful and mystical meditation on remembrance and the passage of time
- It is important to understand the context in which Morsi developed his language of surrealism
- Alexandria in the 1940s became a haven for artists and activists fleeing the Third Reich, culminating in the formation of the Art and Liberty Group and later the Contemporary Art Group
- It is here that Egyptian Surrealism realized its full form, its proponents using the metaphysical in revealing a deep sense of anguish and displacement
- Morsi's visual vocabulary takes root in this potent soil
- As Kaelen Wilson-Goldie wrote in Artforum, 'Distant Shores,' during the 1960s, Morsi experimented with color ad cubism
- She stated that in many of Morsi's works, there are allusions to Picasso, as he is most familiar with Picasso's work in comparison to any other painters
- In Untitled (Bull) (1968), the bull has been drawn in profile with an absence of shadow
- This work showcases the experimentation that led to Morsi's refinement of his Surrealist visual language
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