Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Cairo

Published:
L'Oeuvre De Salah Abdel Kareem, Egyptian Ministry of Culture, 2000, p.166

"Nothing forces us to know
What we do not want to know
Except pain"
― Aeschylus, The Oresteia

Bonham's are delighted to present an important and exquisite published work by the pioneering Egyptian painter, Salah Abdel Kerim. Depicting an architectural fantasy conceived of as a theatre set for Handel's Oreste, the present work combines Grecian, mythological and surreal visual elements to frame the famous ancient tale following Orestes mission of revenge for the murder of his father Agamemnon. Harrowing and other worldly, Kerim's almost supernatural landscape mirrors the nature of the mythological story it conveys, as something existing in the realm between fantasy and reality

It was Hussein Bicar who first discovered the talent of Salah Abdel Kerim and instructed him in the basics of drafting. This encouraged Salah Abdel Kerim to enrol in the Faculty of Fine Arts.

When Salah Abdel Kerim went to Paris to study theatre design and advertising from two great masters, André-Marie Cassandre and Paul Colin, he became familiar with expressionism and abstract art; but he chose a different path, having been seduced by the works of the Surrealists

Born in Fayoum to a large family of five brothers and sisters. In 1938 he met the famous painter Hussein Bikar and became his student in the Faculty of Arts in Qena. He remained very attached to his professor all through his life. In 1940 he meets Hussein Youssef Amin and the Group of Contemporary Art at the secondary school of Farouk First in Abasya district in Cairo when he was introduced to surrealism for the first time.

In 1943 he becomes a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts and graduates with honors in 1947. In 1948 he becomes an assistant to the interior decoration section at the FFA. He is then sent to a mission in Paris in 1952 and he becomes a student to Paul Colin and A.Marie Cassandre for publicity and theatre design.

He then moves to Rome in 1956 to study design for cinema. In 1957 he received the international prize in painting from San Vito Romano, Italy and obtains his PHD from Centro Sperimental di Cinemato Grafia. Back in Egypt in 1958 he is appointed professor at the FFA where he started experimenting with sculpture. In 1959 he received the first prize for sculpture at the Biennale of Alexandria. At the same year he received from the Biennale of Saint Paolo, Brazil an honorary merit for his sculpture 'The Fish'. In 1960 he received the award of the Guggenheim National section for his painting 'Fighting Roosters'.