Biography
Adam Henein was born into a family of silversmiths from Assiout in Cairo and grew up in the neighbourhood of Bab al-Shariya. He was eight when he discovered the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities during a class visit, which he later recalled as a turning point. At age 20, he decided to become a sculptor and joined the Egyptian School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1949. After he graduated in 1953, he travelled to Upper Egypt. He spent several months at the Luxor Atelier established in 1941 by the Alexandrian painter and diplomat Mohammed Naghi (1888–1956) in the village of Gourna on the West Bank of Luxor to promote the study of ancient Egyptian art as part of the curriculum of art schools in Egypt.
In 1957, he received a two-year scholarship to pursue his studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. During one of his exhibitions in 1960, he met the anthropologist Afaf al-Dib, who became his wife and supporter as manager and critic at the beginning of his career. Henein established his home and studio in 1968 in a mud brick house built by architect Ramsis Wissa Wassef (1911–1974) in the village of Harraniya in Giza. In 1971, Henein and his wife moved to Paris, where they stayed for 25 years. During that period, he dedicated himself to his art in his fifteenth arrondissement studio. Henein was an internationally recognised artist when he returned to Egypt in 1996. From 1989 to 1998, he worked with the Ministry of Culture to restore The Sphinx of Giza. In 1996, he founded the Aswan International Sculpture Symposium, an annual workshop and exhibition inviting sculptors worldwide to experiment and create works from the local granite.
Adam Henein is one of the most prominent contemporary sculptors of the Arab World. Throughout his career, he produced many large and small-scale works using materials such as granite, bronze, plaster, limestone and terracotta. His early works embody the graceful solidity of ancient Egyptian statuary and express a sense of simplicity in his engagement with materiality and volumes. Some of his sculptures recall iconic ancient sculptures, such as the scribe commonly known as the Sheikh el-Balad, now at the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities. During the 1960s, Henein conceived a series of animals, such as birds, cats, dogs, owls, goats, horses and donkeys, expressing their minimal and essential features through pure lines and volumes.
The beginning of the 1970s marked a significant evolution in his art due to his engaging with modern sculpture in Paris and finding echoes in works by Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore. Even though Henein never claimed to belong to a specific art group or movement, he was inspired by their freedom of interpretation. During the 1980s, abstract forms, pure volumes, and the dynamic of movement characterised his sculptures, centred on the themes of sun and moon disks and vertical ascension. In the 1990s, he worked on several outdoor large-scale sculptures, including The Ship, conceived as a metaphorical alternative to the museum space. Overall, his work embodies a sense of simple monumentality and timelessness.
Henein was also a talented painter who never used oil painting on canvas but instead renewed ancient techniques such as painting on papyrus sheets with natural pigments mixed with gum Arabic or the traditional method of fresco on plaster. In 1960, he illustrated the work of his friend, the poet Salah Jahine (1930–1986), Quatrains of Salah Jahine, with India ink on paper. His paintings, whether figurative or abstract geometric subjects are characterised by purity of form and warm tones emphasised with a sculptural depth.
Henein has held many individual exhibitions in Cairo, Alexandria, Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Rome and participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world. His works can be seen at his museum in Harraniya, inaugurated in January 2014, the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art in Cairo, and at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, which includes his monumental sculpture, The Ship, located at Mathaf’s entrance.
