Painter
Samir Rafea
Samir Rafi was born in Cairo in 1924, he is one of the most prominent pioneers of surrealism in the 1940s.
He studies at the Faculty of Arts in 1948 and obtained a diploma from the Higher Institute of Art Education in 1950 then he traveled to Paris to do his Ph.D. in Art History at the Sorbonne University in 1954
in the early seventies, he decided that he won’t return to the Arab World after being arrested in Algeria for political reasons to preserve his freedom, but the issues of his country were never absent from his artistic imagination, he continued his career full of painting and sculpture.
He created his artistic achievement, which was characterized by diversity and the embodiment of the pure Egyptian situation, expressing the tragedy of alienation and homesickness to the extent that some critics described him as the “pioneer of popular surrealism” in Egypt.
