Samir Rafea’s creative work represents the artist’s extensive years of creation and his many artistic phases, which is regarded as a notable achievement and proof of the worldwide presence of diverse local, popular, and historic aspects.

In his work, Rafi resorted to focusing on the essence of things and people rather than their apparent form, defining his orientations through his conscience and using his imagination to enter the history of the Egyptian movement as the first symbolic artists after his works demonstrated his influence on realism, surrealism, symbolism, and abstraction, mixing between the philosophy of social life and the philosophy of aesthetics in building creative works.

About the Artist

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.