Surrealism

Founded in Paris in 1924, Surrealism arrived in Cairo within a decade, where a generation of artists saw in the movement's defiance of rational order a powerful tool for political and social critique. In 1939, Egyptian artists led by Georges Henein and Ramses Younan formed the Art and Liberty Group, making Egypt the first non-European country to formally adopt Surrealism. Their dreamlike, psychologically charged paintings — produced in the shadow of fascism, colonialism, and World War II — remain among the most internationally celebrated works of Arab modernism. The Surrealist current continued to shape later artists across the region, including the Contemporary Art Group's Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar and Hamed Nada, whose imagery drew on folk myth, ritual, and the unconscious.