More than 150 names have been revealed as finalists: 61 in sculpture, 55 in painting, 30 in photography, five in visual art criticism, and seven groups in the architecture category.
The Art Awards will be announced within the coming weeks.
According to the Farouk Hosny Foundation for Culture and Arts website, each category will offer three prizes (first, second, and third) with a monetary award ranging between 10 and 50 thousand Egyptian pounds.
The annual award is one of the major activities of the foundation that aims to support artistic and cultural brilliance.
The awards are offered to contemporary emerging or established Egyptian artists as voted and selected by the judging committee based on creative input and artistic uniqueness and excellence.
In addition to Farouk Hosny, the foundation’s board of trustees includes politician and Chairman of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Mostafa El-Feki, businessman Naguib Sawiris, renowned Egyptologist and former Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass, physiologist Momena Kamel, renowned Egyptian writer Mohamed Salmawy, and others.
The foundation’s premises also include a museum that brings together numerous pieces made and collected by Hosny, including works by artists Ragheb Ayad, Adam Henein, Mahmoud Said, Hamed Nada, Mahmoud Mokhtar, Giorgio de Chirico, Antoni Tapies, Nicolas Poussin, and others, as well as a books and music library.
Hosny is one of the best-known contemporary artists in Egypt and the Arab world. He was a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Alexandria in 1964. At a young age, he assumed the prestigious position of heading the Egyptian Academy of Arts in Rome. Later, he was appointed as Egypt's culture minister until his retirement in 2011.
His works have been displayed at major museums of art, including the Metropolitan in New York, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Fort Lauderdale in Miami, the National Museum of Vienna of Austria, the Tokyo Museum of Japan, the Carrousel Museum of the Louvre, and Le Vittoriano Museum in Rome, as well as other Arab and Egyptian Museums.
The list of finalists can be found on the foundation's Facebook page.
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