PROFILE

omar el-nagdi
golden visions

In 1931, the city of Cairo was a bustling hub of trade and commerce, steeped in ancient, Coptic and Islamic history and yet a long way away from the heaving metropolis that it is today. Long before the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, during the World War II British reoccupation, a small boy expressed his creativity by drawing on his mother’s floors and tables, much to his delight and her chagrin. It was the time of King Fuad I, and this small adventurous boy would go on to become one of his country’s greatest artists, exhibiting alongside Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, and becoming one of the youngest artists to be included in the ‘L’Encyclopédie Européenne des Artistes Étrangers’ at the age of 40.

Today, Omar El-Nagdi’s works fetch up to $73,000 at auction, as evidenced by the sale of ‘Al-Ka’aba’ at the Christie’s International Modern and Contemporary art auction held in Dubai on 31 October 2007; he is also the recipient of countless awards, prizes and publications. A museum in Normandy, France, is named after him and he is a professor at Ryad University in Cairo. For El-Nagdi, creativity has, and always will be, foremost. At the age of 21, he held his first exhibition, and a year later enrolled himself at the Helwan University Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo, where he studied for five years, followed by a further five at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Cairo, coming first in his class in both faculties.

In 1959, a 28-year-old El-Nagdi was awarded a scholarship to study ceramics in Moscow; however, with the crisis and escalation of the Cold War at its peak, it was not long before he returned to Cairo. “I couldn’t stay for a full year in Moscow, I just couldn’t,” he says sadly. “It was the time of [Nikita] Khrushchev, and a very complicated period.” With Moscow behind him, he headed for Italy, where he studied at both the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, studying the art of the mosaic at the latter. It was the early 1960s, and El-Nagdi entered a period of meditative, Sufi-inspired works that would last until the late 1970s...