An exhibition of paintings by artist and former culture minister Farouk Hosny was inaugurated at The Complex of Arts inside the Aisha Fahmy Palace on 3 March. 

The exhibition includes 52 paintings produced in 2018-2019 and dealing with many topics, in which Hosny makes a brilliant use of various materials in the expressive abstract style for which he is celebrated. What is new in this show is the artist’s use of the collage style. 

What is remarkable in the artist’s works is that he paints while meditating on space. Details do not concern him on the surface, but he has meticulously selective vision. Perhaps due to his Alexandrian upbringing, the spaciousness of the Mediterranean, its serenity and calmness, appears in his choice of colours and even his way of painting on the canvas without a frame, placing it on a table instead, as if drawing on the water surface, a sea of his ideas. And so the work requires no personification or embodiment, but rather an abstract expression of "the general and comprehensive".

The exhibition will remain on view until 24 March.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 5 March, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly