Biography
While unfairly occluded within the historical record, Khadiga Riaz was at the centre of the first group of artists in Egypt to practice painterly abstraction in the 1950s and the first woman to work in this mode. Born in 1914 to the ranks of an Egyptian elite that claimed political, social, and intellectual leadership in the struggle for national self-determination, Riaz’s grandfather Ahmed Shawqi (1868–1932)—a celebrated poet of Neo-Classical Arabic, often referred to as amīr al-shuʿarā’, or “prince of poets”—was a figurehead of Egypt’s Nahda, or Renaissance movement. Riaz was exposed as a young woman to the radical teachings of the Surrealist or independent Art and Liberty group in Cairo, and her subsequent interest in postwar abstraction was shared with other former members of the group, including Ramses Younan (1913– 1966) and Fouad Kamel (1919– 1999). She emerged as a mature artist in the decade following national independence. The school of abstraction with which Riaz is associated today enjoyed its most significant acclaim in the late 1950s and early 1960s, or just as the Nasserist state started investing heavily in developing high-profile national platforms for the arts such as the Alexandria Biennale (est. 1955).
Riaz’s exposure to Cairo’s Surrealist Art and Liberty group likely came via her sister Ikbal El Alaily (?–1984), whose romantic involvement with the group’s co-founder Georges Henein (1914–1973) dates to 1939. Works that survive this period depict hybrid figures that are part human, part tree, or part underwater flora—a motif shared by other artists exhibiting with Art and Liberty. Inji Efflatoun’s (1924– 1989) The Young Girl and the Monster series, for example, featured anthropomorphic trees with grasping limbs situated in fiery, postapocalyptic landscapes, while Fouad Kamel’s dark visions from the same period featured the intertwined limbs of women and horses and the desiccated branches that struggle to emerge from the earth around them. Likewise, Eric de Nemes (b.1940s) and Amy Nimr (1898–1974) produced underwater scenes of figures or carcasses entwined in ocean-bed flora. Images of “entanglement” would persist in Riaz’s work long after her move away from explicitly Surrealist themes.
Between 1950 and 1954—a period spanning the Free Officers’ coup, or Revolution of 1952—Riaz studied in the Cairo atelier of Armenian émigré and prominent genre painter, Ashod (also spelt Achod) Zorian (b. Kerasund, Armenia, then the Ottoman Empire, 1905–1970). In the late 1950s, Riaz experimented with a continuum of abstract and figurative styles. One approach took Cubism as a point of departure, gravitating towards a pared-down, largely primary colour palette and overlapping geometric forms set against a colourful ground. In some paintings, these forms appear as a detached structure or lattice in the foreground; in others, the rhythmic repetition of forms evokes the experience of music or dance. By the late 1950s, layers of paint applied with a palette knife and brush recall ancient walls caked in dirt, grease, and smoke or the uneven strips of colour created by peeling paint. Many of these works share the centrifugal compositions of postwar paintings by Tachiste artist Wols (1913–1951). In these paintings, Riaz mixed ready-made paints with organic elements, for example, combining zinc oxide and often Red Sea sand to create a reddish-brown or sienna colour. Other elements that she added to her paints included gypsum and wood pulp. Riaz sometimes attacked her painting with a brush and palette knife and inscribed lines directly using pins and wood chips.
In the early 1960s, Riaz began making jewellery using what she called “mummy beads” that she found scattered in the sand near ancient Egyptian gravesites and other locally sourced materials. A 1964 article on the artist lists some of these, including: “Pharaonic pearls, Tel El-Amarna turquoises, Ptolemaic iridescent glass beads, Persian turquoises, Islamic gilded glass beads, Khan el-Khalili glass beads, and popular Nubian decorations such as coral, cornelian, and other stones.” Her use of these materials recalls the Parisian and Egyptian Surrealists’ interest in magic and Ancient Egyptian “magic,” particularly. Riaz exhibited examples of her jewellery in Cairo, Casablanca, New York, and Osaka.
In 1959, Riaz participated in two landmark exhibitions that signaled the arrival of a critical mass of artists working primarily in an abstract vein: Vers l’inconnu/Nahw al-majhool (January 1959) and Encore l’inconnu/al-Majhul la yazal (April 1959). In retrospect, the exhibitions also marked the culmination of a trend towards abstraction that originated in the Surrealist Art and Liberty group’s postwar engagement with automatism. In this vein, a journal titledLa Part du Sable published in February 1947 under the aegis of the Art and Liberty group and edited by Georges Henein was dedicated to automatist art and writing and included contributions from Younan, Fouad Kamel, Sami Rafi‘ and Hassan al-Telmisani. Another contributor and associate of Henein was Henri Michaux (1899–1984), the Belgian-born poet and artist associated with the Tachiste or Art Informel movement in Paris and whose own automatist experiments and mescaline-fueled art-making sessions date to this period.
The connections linking Surrealism in Egypt to the late 1940s helped lay the ground for a new exploration of abstract painting in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Riaz and her colleagues, including Younan, Kamel, and Hassan. Similarly, Younan’s experiments in the late 1940s with decalcomania—an artistic technique in which paint, ink or other medium is pooled on a surface and a piece of paper pressed against it to create a print—presaged Riaz’s use of the technique in the 1960s and 1970s. Many striking works in this vein have a vivid golden hue. In contrast, the milky starscapes in others recall satellite images of deep space or pictures produced by a microscope.
One of Riaz’s best-known works combines classic tropes of Egyptian painting and nationalist discourse—the peasant woman, or fellaha and Ancient Egyptian art—with her interest in abstraction and art informel. The figure of the veiled peasant woman and the Ancient Egyptian wall paintings visible in the background have been reduced to their most basic constitutive elements: their legibility as figures threatening at times to disappear into total abstraction. The painting won Riaz first prize in a 1962 state-sponsored competition of art devoted to “work in the fields”: a fleeting moment of conciliation between figuration in the service of the nationalist cause and a tendency towards the informe.
