Noor Soussi
Head of Department
Lot 35*
Fouad Kamel(Egypt, 1919-1973)Portrait of the Artists Sister Kadriya Kamel
25 November 2025, 14:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street£30,000 - £50,000
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Nima Sagharchi
Group Head
Lylia Hafiz
Sale Coordinator
Fouad Kamel (Egypt, 1919-1973)
Portrait of the Artists Sister Kadriya Kamel
oil on board, framed
signed "Fouad Kamel" and dated "1941" (middle left), executed in 1941
35 x 55cm (13 3/4 x 21 5/8in).
oil on board, framed
signed "Fouad Kamel" and dated "1941" (middle left), executed in 1941
35 x 55cm (13 3/4 x 21 5/8in).
Footnotes
Provenance:
Property from the collection of Professor Hager El Hadidi, niece of Fouad Kamel
Originally in the collection of her mother Kadriya Kamel, the sister of Fouad Kamel
A group of rare examples of Egyptian Surrealism from the collection of Professor Hager El Hadidi, the niece of the artist Fouad Kamel
"Between death and everlasting life there is a fierce battle producing a most dreadful mutilation which I encounter in my paintings. Indeed, into the depths of everything a spirit is creeping, even into the inanimate"
– Fouad Kamel
Fouad Kamel's portrait of his siter, Kadriya Kamel is among the most evocative and psychologically charged works of Egyptian Surrealism. Kadriya, who was both his sister and long-time muse, appears throughout Kamel's practice as a figure through whom the artist explored beauty, intimacy and the unconscious. Like many Surrealists, from Magritte to Ernst, Kamel found in a familiar domestic subject a portal to wider questions of imagination, mortality and desire.
Here, the personal and the uncanny coexist. Kadriya is rendered as both woman and landscape, her form blending seamlessly with the earth around her until one cannot tell where her body ends and the terrain begins. Her contours rise and fall like undulating hills, suggesting both sensuality and dissolution. The scene carries a quiet foreboding, a hint of the macabre that transforms an intimate portrait into an unsettling dreamscape.
In this work, Kamel achieves a rare balance between the domestic and the metaphysical. Through a subject close to his heart, he constructs an image that is at once tender and disquieting, grounding the universal language of Surrealism in the emotional and psychological terrain of home.