SOBHY GUIRGUIS: The Self and The Other is the first posthumous retrospective for the remarkable artist marking the anniversary of his passing in January 2013. The show brings together over 60 of his most definitive paintings and sculptures, many previously unseen, spanning 60 years of artistic production, and reassesses his enduring legacy. Probably the most existential Egyptian artist since Abdel Hady El Gazzar, Sobhy Guirguis leaves behind an unparalleled legacy of avant-gardism, modernism and humanity and offers a breakthrough narrative in Egyptian contemporary art.
Sobhy Guirguis, through his defiantly unconventional geometric abstraction of form, rejected the official prevailing academic-realism, creating a modernism that claimed to tap into the universal. As we enter the realm of one of the more perplexing artistic psyches of the 20th century in the Arab world, we soon realize how his art creates a profound and intimate experience. His sculptural or painted shapes are a metaphor to his secluded life, an autobiography in a way, acknowledging his self and otherness. The best works of Sobhy Guirguis take you to the limit of your capacity to be moved by art.
SOBHY GUIRGUIS was born in 1929 in Cairo, Egypt. He received a BFA, MFA and PhD from the Fine Arts faculty in Cairo and a postgraduate diploma in Florence in 1964. He received the prestigious first prize for Sculpture in Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries in 1994 and the Grand Prize of the Cairo International Biennale in 1994. The estate of Sobhy Guirguis is represented and managed by ArtTalks | Egypt.