Ahmed Morsi

Biography

In 1949 Ahmed Morsi, a nineteen-year-old from Alexandria, published his first diwan, a collection of poems, in his native city. Its title is rendered in English as “Songs of the Temples” or “Songs of the Altars”, depending on the source, and the book carries a second title, “Steps in Darkness”.

He was born in Alexandria in 1930. Some sources give the date as 30 March; others name only the year. His father, according to some accounts, worked in the building trade. He graduated from the University of Alexandria in 1954 with a degree in English literature. The city had no art school at the time, and as a painter he remained without formal training: in 1952–53 he took lessons from Silvio Becchi (spelled Bicchi elsewhere), the son of an Italian painter, and from 1952 he rented a studio at the L’Atelier d’Alexandrie and found a mentor in the sculptor Mahmoud Moussa. Moussa introduced him to the circle known as the Alexandria School. By the early 1950s Morsi was already exhibiting alongside Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar, Hassan El Telmissany, Ibrahim Massouda, Fouad Kamel and Hamed Nada. His first solo show took place in 1953 at the University of Alexandria. He earned his living then at a translation bureau.

In 1955 Morsi went to Baghdad, intending a short visit, and stayed for two years, teaching English. The city was going through a cultural revival, and he quickly entered a circle of local writers and artists: the poet Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, the novelist Fouad al-Tikerly and the painter Ardash Kakavian. With al-Bayati he translated into Arabic books on Éluard and Aragon, published in Beirut in 1959. It was in Baghdad, too, that he began writing about art for the newspaper Al Akhbar.

In 1957 he settled in Cairo. Between 1958 and 1962 he worked for the National Theatre, designing sets and costumes for the first play by Alfred Farag, “The Fall of the Pharaoh”, and for the first play by Abdel Rahman Al Sharkawi. With Al Gazzar he co-designed the sets for Irwin Shaw’s “Bury the Dead” at the Cairo Opera House. Sources call him the first Egyptian to do this work; before him it had been done by Italian designers. A planned book of his poems with drawings by Al Gazzar was never published: the artist died in 1966. Solo exhibitions at the Cairo Atelier began in 1958, and in 1970 he showed his work at the Pace Gallery in London. His mature style took shape in these years: heavily simplified figures in empty, nearly abstract spaces that resemble a shore or a stage. People with elongated limbs and mask-like faces share the space with horses, cats, birds, fish, crowns, tailor’s dummies and clocks.

In 1968, with Edwar Al Kharrat, Ibrahim Mansour, Gamil Atteya, Sayed Hegab and others, he co-founded the avant-garde magazine Galerie 68. That same year he stopped writing poetry, and he returned to it only in 1997. He himself explained the silence as a sense of estrangement; one source names the shock of the Six-Day War as the cause. Throughout this time he wrote criticism, translated, and presented programmes on culture on Cairo radio (1957–74). His books appeared: on Picasso (Baghdad, 1970) and later on American poetry, and for the 1975 Grand Larousse Encyclopédique he wrote articles on art in Egypt and in Iraq. He translated Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge”, and the play was staged at the National Theatre.

In 1974 Morsi moved to New York, where he lives and works. He has spoken of the move as a voluntary exile, and in his paintings of the 1970s and 1980s one can see estrangement and a rootedness in another place; the New York subway and its tunnels appear. Around 1976 he took up lithography at The New School, and at the Art Students League he studied printmaking. In the last twenty years he has added photography. His native city, in his own words, has become a place that is not on any map.

In 1995, at the Mashrabia Gallery in Cairo, Morsi showed “The Artist’s Book” as a form in its own right, and the Library of Alexandria later established a biennial of that name. In 1996 he took part in the Cairo Biennial and sat on its jury. His first retrospective in Egypt was held in 2016 at the Ofok Gallery, part of the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, followed in 2017 by the retrospective “Dialogic Imagination” in Sharjah. The exhibition “Ahmed Morsi in New York: Elegy of the Sea” was hosted in 2023 by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

Morsi’s works are held by the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art in Cairo, the Museum of Fine Arts in Alexandria, Mathaf in Doha, the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Dubai. His poems of the 1950s and 1960s appeared in a collection in 1997, and his collected poems were published in 2012.