AHMED MORSi

Ahmed Morsi (b. 1930, Alexandria) is a New York-based artist, art critic and poet with a multidisciplinary career that spans seven decades of creative output. In the 1950s, he simultaneously studied literature at Alexandria University and painting at the studio of Italian master Silvio Becchi in his native city. Morsi moved to Baghdad in 1955, a time of cultural renaissance in Iraq, when Baghdad was a center for the literati, the artists and the intellectuals. It was also in Baghdad where the artist developed his talent for art criticism and covered significant exhibitions for notable newspapers.

Returning to Egypt, the artist moved to Cairo in 1957. In these years, Morsi was the first Egyptian to work alongside Egypt’s acclaimed playwrights designing stage sets and costumes for The National Theater and the Khedival Cairo Opera House. In 1968, Morsi co-founded the avant-garde magazine, Gallery 68, with a few of Egypt’s most prominent contemporary writers. In 1974, he moved to New York City, where he continues to paint, write and critique from his Manhattan home.

With relentless vitality, Morsi has produced an extensive oeuvre that encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking, poetry, art criticism, stage and costume design. His lyrical and introspective practice attests to the depth of his singular vision. His paintings exude an elegiac and mournful sensibility. Figures are androgynous. Animals are anthropomorphic. Space is nondescript. Morsi’s work offers a powerful meditation on memory, the passage of time, and the very personal state of not belonging, and bears witness to the artist’s life as an Alexandrian that has been living away from home since the 1970s.