Ahmed Morsi

(Egypt, born 1930)

Untitled (Bull)

Footnotes

Provenance:
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. 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.