Hamed Owais

Abstract

Hamed Owais is a leading painter of Egyptian social realism and one of the founders of the Egyptian "Group of Modern Art." His paintings embody the daily life of peasants and the struggle of the Egyptian working class and echo the revolutionary works of the Mexican Muralists. Owais graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1944 and pursued his studies at the Institute of Art Education. After receiving a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, he served as the head of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria between 1977 and 1979.

Biography

Mohammed Hamed Owais was born in 1919 into a peasant family in the small village of Kafr Mansour in the governorate of Beni Soueif. He received his primary and secondary education there before working as a metalworker. He soon realised he was not fit for this profession and moved to Cairo, where he joined the School of Fine Arts. After he graduated in 1944, he pursued his studies at the Department of Drawing at the Higher Institute of Education for Teachers (معهد التربية العالى للمعلمين), where he was trained by the pedagogue and critic Youssef el-Afifi. He received his diploma in 1946 and in the following year, he founded the Group of Modern Art (Jamaʿiyat al-fann al-hadith), together with other artists of his generation, such as Gamal el-Seguini (1917–1977), Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021), Zeinab Abdel Hamid (1919–2002), Salah Yousri (1923–1984), and Youssef Sida (1922–1994).

Between 1948 and 1955, Owais worked as a drawing teacher at a secondary school in Alexandria. He traveled to Italy in 1952 and visited the Venice Biennial, where Italian Social Realist artists exhibited works. In 1958, he was appointed a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria just after it was founded by the sculptor Ahmad Osman (1907–1970). In 1967, Owais received a scholarship to continue his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, where he received his diploma in 1969. From 1977 to 1979, he served as the head of Alexandria's Faculty of Fine Arts. He died in Cairo in 2011 at the age of 92.

Hamed Owais is one of the leading Social Realist painters in Egypt. His work embodies the struggle of the people of the Egyptian working class: peasants, fishermen, labourers, factory workers, artisans, barbers, builders, and market sellers. He was among the first Egyptian artists to address unemployment and labourers' daily lives in the 1940s and 1950s. His work was inspired by the ideas of the Group of Modern Art (Jamaʿiyat al-fann al-hadith), whose members rejected Surrealism, as they believed that art should touch the masses and reflect social concerns. Like other artists of his generation, such as Gamal el-Seguini, Owais was a partisan of the ideals of the 1952 revolution, which he expressed in his works. He admired the European modernists such as Picasso and Matisse and found affinity with Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera (1886–1957) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974).

Owais developed a clear and direct style portraying the life of the average Egyptian worker. His peasants or fishermen are massive and muscular, reflecting his social convictions. Their large bodies are often enclosed in the canvas's reduced space, which appears as a metaphor for the social boundaries of Egyptian society. When he moved to Alexandria, Owais was inspired by the abundance of light and vibrant colours of the Mediterranean port and by the work of Alexandrian painter Mahmoud Saïd (1897–1964). Although Hamed Owais is commonly associated with the socialist ideology of the Gamal Abdel Nasser era, his original style and work reflect his humanist character.

Owais' work can be seen in the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo, the Museum of Fine Arts in Alexandria, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, and the Dalloul Art Foundation in Beirut. Although he is one of the most prominent Egyptian artists of his generation, only a few studies have been devoted to his life and work, which deserve to be documented in greater depth.

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