Salah Yousri

Inspired by local traditions and popular symbolism, the present work by Salah Yousri is impregnated with social realism. Alongside his fellow members of the Egyptian Modern Art Group, the artist dedicated much of his work to a quest for the Egyptian soul (Mikdadi 2004). Yousri’s style and form soon gained international recognition and the artist subsequently exhibited at the 1952 Venice Biennale as well as at international galleries across Europe including Andre Weil and Galerie Marciac in Paris.

The dense composition of this painting achieves to convey the heaviness of agricultural duties under the Egyptian blazing sun, using warm-toned colours in delineated sections that stretch towards an endless horizon. In choosing to represent a fellah in a classic ancient Egyptian profile pose, Yousri emphasises his country’s ancestral artistic heritage while subtly demonstrating his political engagement, in what can be interpreted as a call for social reform.

A number of works by the artist are conserved in the Museum of Modern Art, Cairo. 

S. Mikdadi, Egyptian Modern Art, in HEILBRUNN TIMELINE OF ART HISTORY, ESSAYS. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004.

Accessible at: www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/egma/hd_egma.htm.