Ordinary folk have been a popular subject among major Egyptian artists including Mahmoud Said and Injy Aflatoun, who each depicted them from a unique perspective. In his last exhibition at Falak Gallery (2 April-12 May), Omar Elfayoumi kept up this tradition with 51 paintings ranging in size from miniature to larger than life. Since his career started in the early 1980s, Elfayoumi has offered visions of daily life in Egypt, and in focusing on the subjects of those visions the present work is no exception.
Elfayoumi, who was born in 1957 in Giza, has always painted figures and in his previous exhibition, The Arrival of the Barbarians, held last year at the Downtown Zahwa Gallery, they were menacing, evil creatures. This time round there are still some of those but there are also others, with more relaxed, layered portraits showing a unique mix of warm and cool hues and bold brushstrokes. One 120 x 210 cm piece, Isis: Return of the Soul, made in 2025 for the 45th General Exhibition, is his first ever mixed media piece, using cardboard as well as fabric and a palette dominated by red, blue and green, and showing a woman gazing sharply at the viewer with a faint smile.
Here as elsewhere — especially in the 12 pieces made in 2026 — the characters feel strangely real. They appear either alone or in small groups, something he attributes to the loneliness of life today. In an 80 x 100 cm piece showing five male figures who, despite their physical proximity, are so lost in thought as to be in different worlds. The central figure in a black shirt has his hands on his knees and appears evil, but the others ignore him.
“It’s something that has been in my work since shortly after graduation. You could see it in my contribution to a group exhibition at the Cairo Atelier, this feeling of alienation between people. It didn’t come from my experience of my community, though. It must’ve been built-in somehow. I like to meditate on the details of people’s lives and their feelings,” Elfayoumi told me at the gallery, “which is a very complicated business. Depicting people is a lot of fun, but involving yourself in their issues is risky.”
Another 120 x 210 cm acrylic on canvas piece is a portrait of a man standing alone in a decorated balcony, with clothes layered on a laundry dryer, On the Window. It is inspired by a real scene in the Al- Haram neighbourhood in the 1980s, with an officer who used to stand in the window every day at a certain hour. The scene is vivid, with the green window and the bunch of garlic bulbs hanging on its edge. The figure has a strong presence and a sharp if benign gaze. A similar scene is depicted on the same scale with two women and a girl standing at the window chatting.
At the end of 1990s, after his return from his long stay in Russia, Elfayoumi chose to live in an old building on Mohamed Ali Street, Cairo’s traditional hub of musicians, dancers, and instrument makers, which has inspired him to no end; and many scenes here seem to originate in there. Architecture figures prominently, and people are depicted by and large in their familiar spaces, at cafes or in middle-class homes that evoke Naguib Mahfouz’s novels. Two 2019 paintings — of a woman stretched out on a sofa, and two women chatting on the same sofa — typify this rule beautifully, forming a kind of diptych. One exception is The Road to Rosetta, the result of Elfayoumi’s participation in the 2024 Luxor Painting Symposium. It features Luxor’s cityscape.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 May, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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