Hamed Abdalla (1917-1985) is a pioneer of Egyptian modernism. The Zentrum Paul Klee dedicates a presentation to his work in the series FOKUS. FOKUS shows particular aspects of Paul Klee’s work or contributions to the global reception of this artist within the permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee.
Abdalla was born in Egypt. His origins, mainly the villages and landscapes of the Nubian region and Cairo, were motifs at the beginning of his career. From the 1950s, Abdalla lived in Copenhagen and Paris, but he continued to refer in his works to the political situation in his homeland.
As an artist of the Hurufiyya movement, which explored new artistic possibilities of the Arabic alphabet, Abdalla developed his own “creative words”: he translated Arabic words into colours, bringing together abstraction and human figuration, the secular and the sacred, and the poetic and the political. Abdalla also experimented with different techniques and materials.
He also studied European modernism, especially Paul Klee and how Klee incorporated non-European visual languages such as Egyptian hieroglyphics into his art. Abdalla looked at Klee from a new perspective by identifying and highlighting those elements in which the Bauhaus artist had appropriated non-European motifs.
With around 50 works, the exhibition showcases these and several other focal points from Abdalla’s oeuvre.