Maternité Brune, 1961
Omar El Nagdi

Omar El Nagdi was born in Cairo in 1931. Little Omar came from a bourgeois-peasant family in the governate of Chankieh.

In 1952 he obtained his first prize in the competition of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo. By the moral values, the mentality and the rhythm of the life led by his bourgeois and country family, Omar El Nagdi, keeps in him, as in his works, the stamp of the peasant and the stamp of the simple and spontaneous life. A life marked by the rich presence of a great culture, that of orality, whose verbal and rhythmic artistic traditions belong to the geniuses of "Thousand and One Nights", "Sirat" and epics.

Unrolling his pictorial partition halfway between Arab and Western cultures, at the crossroads of poetic Reality, Cubism, Expressionism and the great tradition of Egyptian wall decoration, Omar El Nagdi has never ceased to think and reveal the world by creating a picture book of incredible diversity and unparalleled plastic intensity! The place that the artist occupies in the panorama of Egyptian art of the twentieth century would make more than one dream. Since 1960, the art of Omar El Nagdi has settled "at the top of the bill", and it has remained there. His biography attests to it. Without even stopping at his multiple personal or group exhibitions, we will only retain a few dates drawn from a truly breathtaking track record.

In 1953 he graduated with the Honorary Prize from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cairo, and in 1957 graduated with the Honorary Prize from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Cairo. He left for Russia in 1959 and studied ceramics in Moscow. Then his path took him to Italy to study fresco and mosaic and in 1964 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Its presence in 1962 in Rome alongside artists such as Picasso, Dali, De Chirico, confirms its value and the recognition of its peers. In 1963 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna (Mosaic). In Rome, as in Venice, Omar El Nadgi has become a confirmed painter and recognized by plastic arts circles, artistic criticism, theater and music. In 1964 he was appointed professor at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Cairo.

In 1964-1965 he founded the Mountain Mosaïc Society, which is the only one to have a link with the local Mosaic Art. In 1965 he became a member of the Thomas Compainilio International Academy in Rome. He set off again for Holland and from 1968 to 1969 he studied screen printing at the Jan Van Eck Academy in Maastricht. In 1970 he entered the International Artists section of the French Encyclopedia, Larousse. Then he became a member of the Association des Amis des Beaux Arts from 1970 to 1973.

From 1971 to 1974 he was a member of the Egyptian Television Program Committee and General Manager of the Egyptian Television Production Department as well as Director of the Plastic Art Program on television (Art and our Life), he directed more than 32 films documentaries, participates in the realization of film sets or television serials, composes the music of 9 popular, religious, patriotic songs appealing to emotion. From 1975 to 1987 he created the sets for television in Abu Dhabi. In 1977 he obtained the Doctorate from the Council of the Egyptian University.

From 1982 until 1988 he was Professor of Art at the University of King Saud in Riyadh and from 1988 to 1991, Professor and Chairman of the Furniture and Interior Architecture Department of the Faculty of Applied Arts-Helwan University of Cairo. In 1995 he was guest of honor at the Kuwait Biennale and at the International Exhibition in Paris. The same year he will have a major personal exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Since 1994 he has had a solo exhibition every year at the Galerie Danielle Bourdette Gorzkowski in Honfleur.

In 2008 Dubai devotes an important exhibition to him on calligraphy. At the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 2009, he won the Taylor Foundation Prize, and in 2010 he was the guest of honor at the same Salon.

Much has been written about the painting of Omar El Nagdi and the prestigious feathers were inexhaustible to praise the sublime song and the power of the Egyptian artist. Animated by a prodigious dynamism, his works, whether of modest or monumental format, reveal the inexhaustible ardor of a temperament which is expressed as well by the color as by the material and the line, uniting these three elements. in a kind of warm epic in the service of an avowed humanism.

The Sarajevo masterpiece is to El Nagdi what Guernica is to Picasso. This monumental canvas, a real pictorial Requiem, betrays the artist's will to become involved in his turn in the history of his time, to unite the commitment of man to that of the artist, to inscribe his art in a statement denouncing the miseries and misfortunes of war. In this, Omar El Nagdi walks in the footsteps of Jacques Callot (1592-1635) from Lorraine, the great Rubens, Goya, Courbet, Delacroix, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann or Picasso, all attentive witnesses, all deeply revolted, all "plastically" committed to their time ...

However, we cannot "reduce" the artist's pictorial horizon to this painful expressionism, however emotional it may be. Omar El Nagdi knows how to compose vast deplorations as well as light-hearted scores of incomparable freshness.

Omar El Nagdi is one of those rare artists who work tirelessly for the ever-renewed enchantment of life. We had to wait for this great artist from Cairo to finally reconcile Pierre Bonnard and Pablo Picasso. However, Omar El Nagdi has developed a perfectly identifiable plastic vocabulary which, despite the diversity of its techniques and media, cannot be compared to any other. His great culture of Islam allows him to fertilize the aging lands of Western pictorial grammars. Beyond the Egyptian community, it is the memory of all humanity that the work of Omar El Nagdi undertakes to perpetuate, like a universal dream engraved for centuries to come ...

- Noël Coret