Hussein Bicar (Egyptian, 1912-2002)

Unmissable personality of the Egyptian artistic scene from the 20th century, Hussein Bicar’s rich and colourful career stretched in many fields such as painting and also teaching art at schools and universities for more than sixty years. The present work, Misr Al-Salaam (‘Egypt-Peace’) painted in 1995 is a charming composition combining figuration and geometrically abstracted stylisation, infused with an unparalleled musical dynamism. Bicar depicts a slender silhouette of a young girl majestically dressed in a long white tunique who is feeding doves, symbols of peace, elegantly swooping around her. The birds shape a circle whose epicentre is the woman creating a whirling effect through this rotational movement as well as conveying a sense of passionate romanticism and poetry to the scene. Caught o guard by the doves’ frenetic agitation, the graceful woman seems to be pulled between control and abandon, enhanced by the contrast between her static head and her body apparently being carried away.