The Legendary | Picasso Art Gallery

Past

The Legendary

George Bahgory

13 November - 30 November 2024

About the Artist

George Bahgoury, titled “The Granddaddy of Egyptian Caricature” was born in Luxor in 1932.

He is an Egyptian-French contemporary artist who possesses an exceptional mastery of painting, sculpture, painting, and caricature amongst many other artistic mediums. Bahgoury made his way to the top of the Egyptian art scene with steady steps that started by studying at the Fine Arts Faculty in Zamalek, then later moved on to study fine arts at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Bahgoury’s work can be categorized as expressionist and cubist, integrating bright colors and bold brush strokes that carry traces of nostalgia, preserving the Egyptian culture within their motifs and allusions.

Before making a name for himself as a world-renowned cubist painter, George Bahgoury initiated his career in art as a cartoonist in the Egyptian publication ‘Rose El-Youssef’, in 1950; where his piercing reflections on the political and cultural zeitgeist of the time made him rise to prominence among Egypt’s best cartoonists and caricature artists.

With the Nasserist ideology of Pan-Arabism, women’s rights, and national reform seeping into Bahgoury and his peers’ work at the time, he skillfully integrated various notions of Egypt’s culture and national history into his work, and naturally, George Bahgoury’s figurative style, satire, and political awareness transposed to his paintings.

Influenced by Pablo Picasso’s modern surreal cubism, Egyptian modernist Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar’s folk imprint, German expressionist Paul Klee, and Egyptian Fayoum portraits