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The Will

9 January - 30 June, 2025

THE WILL by Ahmed Nawar is a captivating exhibition that explores the evolution of Nawar’s drawings from 1960 to date. Nawar is one of the most influential contemporary artists in the region, and drawing enjoys a prominent status in his creative experience. The art of drawing has always had a vigorous and progressive presence in primitive arts, ancient arts, and now in contemporary art. Drawing continues to be one of the most powerful tools in art education, developing optical senses, sharpening observation skills, enhancing the memory, deepening perception, and igniting the imagination.

Drawing is a significant aspect of Nawar’s creative work, treated as a distinct form of visual art. To Nawar, drawing is not a mere prep for an artwork in another medium. Rather, it is an independent work of art that Nawar introduced in multiple exhibitions. Drawing is an important key to understanding Nawar’s entire multidiscipline experience, and it clearly reveals his constructive abilities and performing skills that he invested in presenting drawing as a comprehensive and expressive form of art.

Ahmed Nawar continues to create new experiences in this form of art to be added to his expansive and influential history in the Arab contemporary art movement. THE WILL Exhibition presents art enthusiasts with a rare opportunity to discover Ahmed Nawar’s remarkable works of art, and gain insight into the legacy of one of Egypt’s most significant contemporary artists.

Catalog

FEATURED ARTISTS

Ahmed Nawar

Artist

Ahmed Mohamed Ismail Nawar, born in 1945, is a distinguished Egyptian artist and academic. He earned his professorship in painting, an Egyptian doctorate equivalent, from the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, Spain, in 1975. He served as a full-time professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University, and was the founder and dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Minya University from 1982 to 1988.
Nawar has held nearly one hundred exhibitions across the world, including in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Spain, France, England, Austria, North America, Cuba, Norway, Switzerland, Italy, Finland, and Moscow, Russia. His works are featured in numerous prestigious collections, including the Cairo and Alexandria museums in Egypt, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in the USA, institutions in Madrid, Kraków, France, Bulgaria, Doha, the Royal Court of Oman, Mexico, and Sharjah, UAE, in addition to various private collections.
Among his most notable public sculptures in Mexico are the Statue of Liberty in Isla Mujeres, the Statue of Will in Chetumal, and the Statue of Challenge in Monterrey, which stands 25 meters tall and weighs 80 tons of iron.

Throughout his career, Nawar has received more than twenty-seven national and international awards, including the First Prize at the 1972 Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries, the Fredrikstad Triennale Prize in Norway in 1989, the State Appreciation Award in 2013, and the Nile Award for Art in 2019. He has also been honored with numerous prestigious medals, such as Egypt's State Medal of Sciences and Arts (First Class) in 1979 and 2013, the Order of Arts and Letters (Officer Grade) from the French Government in 1995, the International Order of Merit from the International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, UK, in 2000, the Medal of Honor from