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Fouad Kamel (Egypt, 1919-1973) The Hidden Eye image 1
Fouad Kamel (Egypt, 1919-1973) The Hidden Eye image 2
Lot 36*

Fouad Kamel
(Egypt, 1919-1973)
The Hidden Eye

25 November 2025, 14:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street

£6,000 - £10,000

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Fouad Kamel (Egypt, 1919-1973)

The Hidden Eye
pencil on paper, framed
signed "Fouad Kamel" and dated "41" (lower right), executed in 1941
30 x 23cm (11 13/16 x 9 1/16in).

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

"The eye is one of the most charged symbols in Surrealism, representing at once vision, vulnerability, and the act of perception itself. In Surrealist art and cinema, the eye becomes a site of revelation and violence: a gateway to the unconscious. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou (1929), with its infamous image of an eye being sliced open, remains the most visceral articulation of this idea: to see truly, one must destroy the surface of ordinary sight. For many Surrealists, the eye was not merely an organ of vision but a metaphor for inner seeing, a mirror of desire, fear, and awakening, where the external world dissolves into the landscape of the mind."

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