El-Gazzar, born in 1925 in Alexandria, is a leading figure in modern Egyptian art of the 20th century. He enrolled at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1944 and then joined the Contemporary Art Group founded by Hussein Youssef Amin, his master. With an innovative and unique expressionist style, he depicts the people of Cairo in a folkloric way. Later, he tried abstraction by representing industrial machines and their effects on humans.
Recognized during his lifetime, El-Gazzar’s production was exhibited in France in 1949, at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and at the São Paulo Museum in 1953. Today, his works are in private collections in Cairo , Alexandria, Rome, Paris and Brussels, but also in major institutions around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.
This catalog raisonné published in English includes two volumes. The first is devoted to the artist’s paintings and the second to graphic works, archives and photographs. It provides an understanding of the artist’s enigmatic work, but also of modern Egyptian art in general.