Abdel Kerim, who Safarkhan consider's Egypt's most versatile Modernist, was shapeshifter of meanings and materials, yet he also gave form to even the voids between life and death, ruin and resurrection, memory and myth. In doing so, he was not simply one of the pioneers of Egyptian modernism; he was arguably the chief architect who forged it.
Formative Years: Origins of a Genius (1925-1947)
Born in the Cairene desert lake suburb of Fayoum in 1925, Salah Abdel Kerim was the third of five children. He has been posthumously recognized as more than a painter, sculptor, academic and everything in between — he was a force of transformation and transcendence in the visual language of modern Egypt, and the nation’s most versatile ever modern artist. Raised in a family grounded in public service, his early fascination with nature — collecting birds, butterflies and other insects — would later become a recurring technical and visual underpinning in his art. This childhood pastime was instrumental in the artist’s later fascination and comprehension of biological anatomy and became foundational to his celebrated multifarious oeuvre. Animals were not merely symbols for him; they were sentient characters, reflective of power, struggle, and spiritual resonance. Even as a child, he was composing a bestiary not solely for biological or anatomical study, but also for emotional and expressive inquiry.
At age 13, in 1938 Abdel Kerim began his formal artistic training under the mentorship of the widely respected Hussein Bicar (1913-2002) at the faculty of Fine Arts, Qena. It proved to be a relationship which would inspire and further refine the gifted student’s innate ability with an advanced developed technique and philosophical engagement with art. Around 1940, during his schooling at the King Farouk I Secondary School in Abassiya (Cairo), he was introduced to Hussein Youssef Amin (1904-1984), founder of the 1946 avant-garde Group of Contemporary Art (Le groupe d'art contemporain) and instructor to some of Egypt’s most renowned Modernists including Hamed Nada (1924-1990) and Abdel Hadi El Gazzar (1925-1966). It was at this critical juncture that Abdel Kerim was first exposed to surrealism, an early influence on his creative approach. This group’s approach was an expressionist brand of surrealism, one in which Amin emphasized originality of thought and painting over mere mimicry, something which Abdel Kerim internalized and later expounded upon and embodied in his multiform artistic endeavors.
In 1943, Abdel Kerim enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo, graduating in 1947 with a high distinction in ornamentation and interior decoration. At his alma mater, he emerged not just as a student of form, but of philosophy — graduating top of his class in ornamentation. The eager postgraduate’s exploits began immediately thereafter, as he served as an assistant in the interior decoration department, blending pedagogy with practice in his first official capacity as a recent graduate. Abdel Kerim’s early life was defined by an inordinate natural ability, which was supplemented, honed and refined by the fortuitous exposure to some of the leading artists of the golden age of Egyptian modernism. One imagines it would have been abundantly evident to his teachers and mentors even from a young age that Abdel Kerim would eventually emerge as one of the veritable pioneers of the storied Modernist tradition that was earnestly taking shape in Egypt at the time.
European Sojourn: The Gift of Versatility (1948-1958)
In 1952, Abdel Kerim’s talent was recognized shortly thereafter by the Egyptian state. He received the prestigious Ismail State Prize and concurrently a grant to further his artistic education in Europe. He first went to Paris, where he trained under the distinguished tutelage of Paul Colin (1892-1985) and André-Marie Cassandre (1901-1968), prolific master illustrators of decorative arts posters, scenographers, graphic designers and theatre painters. During this time Abdel Kerim specialized in advertising and theatre design, artforms that would later become one of his broad oeuvre’s most indispensable facets. He continued these exploits by studying scenography, theatricality and cinema décor in Rome, which informed the unmatched dimension to his multidisciplinarity that he would later be renowned for. Abdel Kerim was never satisfied with a single medium. In many respects, he hybridized the notion of an artist in the traditional sense, encompassing veritable roles of; painter, interior designer, muralist, ceramicist, sculptor, mosaicist, scenographer, caricaturist, graphic designer, academic and ultimately philosopher of art and design.
By 1956, Abdel Kerim moved to Rome to further study cinema décor at the prestigious Center of Experimental Cinema (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia). There, he earned his Ph.D. and the following year he also received the International Painting Prize at San Vito Romano. He also attended the workshop of famed ceramicist Salvatore Meli (1929-2011), proving to be exceptional at this artform. Though regrettably he could not continue this practice in Egypt due to kilns not being readily accessible, most of the ceramics he created are now housed at the Egyptian Academy in Rome at the behest of fellow modernist Salah Kamel (1917-1993), the institute’s director from 1956-1979. Upon returning to Egypt in 1958, he was duly appointed as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo. At the Faculty of Fine Arts Helwan he also headed the Interior Architecture section and contributed to the Cinema and Theatre Institutes.
It was across the Mediterranean where Abdel Kerim became exposed to the breadth of artforms he perfected and made his own. His forays into poster art, ceramics, mosaics, stage and costume design, interior décor and lastly dessin and portraiture, the latter of which he produced almost entirely whilst in Europe, employing his own style of washed (lavis) sepia technique which aptly engendered animating life to inanimate objects. However, Abdel Kerim nobly believed Egyptian modernism needed to transcend both Eurocentric mimicry and nationalist nostalgia — it needed to speak in an original, personalized and ingenious language, and he lived that example with aplomb. In 2015, Safarkhan founder Sherwet Shafei on the eve of a retrospective dedicated to the master, the last solo exhibition hosted for the artist at the gallery, remarked on the significance of his versatility as an artist; “The multifaceted art of Abdel Kerim is partly characterised and informed by the wondrous fusion between Oriental and Western culture. This results from the fact that the artist studied abroad, and travelled extensively across Italy, Spain, Switzerland and settled in France.”
Master of Medium: ‘Sculpting from Emptiness’ (1958-1963)
Abdel Kerim produced some of the most celebrated oil paintings of his scintillating career throughout this period. His painting works seemed to simultaneously embody qualities of geometric, cubist, expressionist, surrealist, figurative and abstract genres, marrying them together with a sensational touch of genius. His painting is charged with a certain vitality, symbolic tension, and effusiveness communicated through a masterful anatomical expertise, and a sublime palette, which quickly garnered international recognition. One of his master oil works ‘Fighting Cocks’ earned him the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s national section award in 1960. But it was in sculpture that he would find his most radical voice, his ultimate calling and his most supreme talent of all his myriad specialities. Working with a variety of scrap metal, he developed a self-described technique he called “sculpting from emptiness,” which Christie’s defines as ‘fashioning expressive, organic forms by coaxing beauty from scrap metal and interiors rather than imposing premeditated designs.’
Rather than chiseling or modeling from a preconceived block, he built forms from the inside outward, allowing air, light, and negative space to inform the sculpture's dynamic presence. According to Christie’s, ‘a particularly insightful artifact of his philosophy emerges in a 1963 interview, where he rejected the notion of art serving as nationalist mimicry.’ Despite being repeatedly commissioned for various national monuments, he maintained: “I do not believe in the creation of a ‘national’ art… Sculpture must accept these changes. I no longer work the block starting from the surface: I start from the interior, working outwards to the exterior.” He quickly became known deferentially and affectionately as ‘the scrap artist’ within artistic circles in Egypt and the Arab world. His sculptures were not merely assemblages — they were resurrections. Each piece carried the tension between decay and dignity, between feral wildness and inner peace. Abdel Kerim’s works were thus confrontational to the viewer, forcing introspection and a grappling with the philosophical quandaries he explored through his art.
Abdel Kerim’s bronze bull (‘Le Taureau’) at the 1959 Alexandria Biennale roared with mythic force, winning the first prize for sculpture. In the same year, he was decorated by the São Paolo Biennale with the honorary merit for his sculpture ‘The Fish’ (‘Le Poisson’). Adding to his list of prestigious accolades, perhaps the crowning achievement of his celebrated career was his magisterial ‘Cry of the Beast ’ (‘Le Cri de l'Animal’) sculpture, meticulously and arduously crafted from scrap metal, nails, coils, bolts, and automotive mechanical parts. It was the epitomization of Abdel Kerim’s signature approach — “sculpting from emptiness.” Following this feat of sculpting masterclass, he was prominently featured for this work under the theme of ‘The Energy of Form’ alongside an engraving by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) on the same page of Larousse’s seminal L’Art et l’Homme (1961) encyclopedia authored by former Louvre curator René Huyghe, hence identifying Abdel Kerim as one of the pioneers of global Modern Art. The latter work was exhibited at the São Paolo Biennale in 1963 for which he received the honorary merit of the event's 7th edition. This now iconic sculpture was in essence a stirring primal elegy — part scream, part prayer — communicating the tense dichotomy between creation and destruction.
Legacy of a Visionary: Philosopher of Form (1964-1988)
Salah Abdel Kerim was even more than Egypt’s most multidisciplinary modernist, he was a peerless visionary who reshaped the landscape of modern art in Egypt through a diverse and profound body of work that transcended traditional boundaries — melding every distinct facet of his sheer artistic breadth into a singular and enduring creative trajectory and purpose. Abdel Kerim's journey traces the evolution of an artist in dialogue with time, material, and identity. He fascinatingly reimagined ancient Egyptian artforms — which he always remained influenced by and reverent of — through the eyes of modern existentialism. Where Pharaonic art celebrated divine perfection, Abdel Kerim’s art eschewed this whilst retaining its mastery of proportion and form, and instead explored humanity’s imperfection, which was the anatomy and reality of the lived human experience. In doing so, he cultivated an unparalleled interpretation and practice of modern Egyptian art unmoored from mimicry and tethered instead to universal human expression.
Mirroring the often monumental stature of his artforms, was his own eventual status as a colossus of global Modernism. A testament to his legacy, Abdel Kerim received the National Medal of Distinction in 1985, and in that same year to mark the occasion, a major retrospective of his works was held at the French Cultural Centre in Cairo (Institut Français d'Égypte au Caire), inaugurated by Egypt's then Minister of Culture Ahmed Heykal and by then French Ambassador to Egypt, Pierre Hunt. His public works left an enduring mark on Egypt’s and indeed global cultural infrastructure. Highlights include his mosaic mural at Alexandria’s Maritime Station; contributions of his sculpture to various local and international museums; large-scale murals and plaza design projects in the Gulf; and set design of the Egypt pavilions at several World Fairs in Seattle (1961), New York (1964) and Osaka (1970) to name but a few. Despite being public works, all of these efforts embodied Abdel Kerim’s signature ability to convey emotive intimacy through the grandeur and scale of monumentality. His academic career culminated in 1982 where in his various capacities as teacher, dean, and eventually vice president of Helwan University, Abdel Kerim mentored and inspired generations of artists, impressing upon them that technical skill must always serve conceptual depth.
Following his death on November 20, 1988 — Helwan University declared a day of mourning in his honour. Abdel Kerim’s subsequent legacy now ceaselessly pulses through Egypt’s artistic landscape. His sculptures continue to muse in metallic tones about beauty, survival, the duality of man, and the strange holiness of beasts. Salah Abdel Kerim was not just a creator of forms — he was an architect of cultural identity, shaping how modern Egypt saw itself through art that bends and often breaks — traditional expectations. His works remain both structural and spiritual, paradoxically grounded in the physicality and permanence of the metal he so adeptly manipulated, and the ephemeral nature of the human experience and the imagination of myth. In the history of 20th-century Egyptian art, Salah Abdel Kerim remains singular, and his art symbolizes the mantra of Safarkhan founder Sherwet Shafei that ‘the power of art transcends.’ Abdel Kerim was shapeshifter of meanings and materials, yet he also gave form to even the voids between life and death, ruin and resurrection, memory and myth. In doing so, he was not simply one of the pioneers of Egyptian modernism; he was arguably the chief architect who forged it.