Painter
Salah Taher
Taher was born in Cairo in 1911, he’s an Egyptian Painter and Educator. His intellectual approach to abstraction has made a lasting impression on modern Egyptian art.
Taher finished his studies at Cairo’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1934. He later became a lecturer for the same Academy, where he remained until 1954.He also worked for the Museum of Modern Arts in Cairo in 1954 and the Khedival Opera House in 1962. He also was a professor at Cairo’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the Cinema Institute. Taher was chosen head of Cairo’s Society of Advocates of Fine Arts in the 1980s.
His pictures of imagined characters and events were rendered in vibrant shapes and colors. His main sources of inspiration were music and literature. He might translate a structured piece of music into whirling form patterns in gestural applications. Arabic calligraphy was very significant in his work. Taher was an athlete and a skilled yogi.He believed that physical and mental meditation were the only ways to gain true understanding.
He was, nevertheless, uninterested in mastering a specific calligraphy style. Instead, he mimicked the motion used in the formation of Arabic characters. He constructed a sequence of abstractions utilizing the Arabic word Huwa, which means “He” and refers to the ultimate creator.
Taher left behind a library of forty thousand books that covered a broad range of subjects such as literature, music, art history, and human psychology.
He received the State Incentive Award, the Alexandria Biennale Award, and the Guggenheim Award between 1959 and 1961.
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina produced an encyclopedic volume commemorating his life and work in 2001, honoring him with Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz in a completely dedicated program called ‘The brush and the pen.
Salah Taher died in Cairo in 2003, leaving behind an artistic legacy.
