Egypt’s Hamed Nada’s painting 'The Nubian Girl' on sale at Bonhams Auctions

CAIRO – 17 May 2022: Bonhams Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers in London is preparing to present an auction titled “Modern & Contemporary Middle Eastern Art, Including on the Banks of the Nile”, on May 24.

The auction includes many paintings by pioneering plastic 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 the auction.

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

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 that time, he met the painter and educator Hussein Youssef Amin (1904 - 1984), who was teaching drawing in secondary schools. Amin rejected the academic curriculum followed at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo and adopted 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 French Lycée in Cairo, and displayed about 200 paintings, most of which depict popular life in Egypt and deal with social issues.

Nada’s works, starting in the fifties, depicted interior scenes in the homes of poor families, expressing the interiors of human surrender and reliance on fate and destiny.

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