Hussein Bikar

Duroub Gallery, Cairo
Collection of Dr. Rania Serbah-Campos, California (acquired directly from the above in the late 1990s)

Born in Beirut, Dr Rania Serbah-Campos was a journalist, writer, lecturer and publisher living in Cairo. Her collection focused on Egyptian modernist artists whose form of expression she admired and recognised their importance in the canon of Middle Eastern art history. 

As a young child in Alexandria, Bikar was described as an artistic prodigy. He was a talented painter, poet, illustrator, story teller, and musician until his death in 2002. By the precocious age of eight, he mastered the lute and by the following year he was teaching the practice to others. While paying homage to the miniature paintings of the earlier Islamic period, Bikar had the keen ability to articulate form in an impeccable relation to geometry spacing his compositions in a logical and linear manner. Just like miniature paintings of India, Persia, Turkey and the Arab world, Bikar flattens his overlaying patterns to demarcate an imaginative sense of space and perspective.