Hamed Nada’s painting “The Nubian Girl” – social networks

CAIRO – May 17, 2022: Bonhams Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers in London is preparing to present an auction titled ‘Modern and Contemporary Art from the Middle East, including the banks of the Nile’, on May 24.

The auction includes many paintings by pioneering visual artists and some contemporary artists.

Among the paintings on display is Hamed Nada’s painting titled “The Nubian Girl”. It is estimated to fetch between £25,000 and £35,000 at auction.

Hamed Nada was born in the Al-Khalifah district, next to the Citadel of Cairo. Being the son of a religious sheikh, he grew up in a pious environment and was deeply influenced as a child by daily life in Al-Khalifah and Al-Sayyida Zainab regions.

In the early forties, he was a student at Helmiya Secondary School (then Farouk I School), where he developed an interest in art, psychology and philosophy.

At this time, he met the painter and pedagogue Hussein Youssef Amin (1904 – 1984), who taught drawing in high schools. Amin rejected the academic curriculum followed at the Cairo School of Fine Arts and embraced a new approach to art education based on the individual development and freedom of expression of his students.

This experience generated the Contemporary Art Group, to which many of his students belonged, such as Hamed Nada, Abdel Hadi Al-Gazzar, Ibrahim Masouda, Maher Raef, Kamal Youssef, Salem Al-Habashi, Samir Rafea and Mahmoud Khalil.

The group held its first exhibition in May 1946 at the Lycée Français in Cairo and displayed around 200 paintings, most of which depicted popular life in Egypt and dealt with social issues.

Nada’s works, from the fifties, depicted interior scenes in the homes of poor families, expressing the interiors of human abandon and trust in fate and fate.

As symbols of the human spirit, he frequently used cats, lamps, and chairs allegorically in his paintings. During the 1960s, after studying ancient Egyptian art closely while living in the studio in Luxor, his work began to unfold in two-dimensional spaces filled with stylized, asymmetrical human figures.