Sculptor and painter · Egypt
Adam Henein
Adam Henein (1929–2020) was an Egyptian sculptor and painter, the most celebrated Egyptian sculptor since Mahmoud Mokhtar. His simplified figures of people, birds and animals in bronze and granite carry the stillness of ancient Egyptian art into modern form. After many years in Paris he returned to Egypt, led the design team for the restoration of the Great Sphinx, founded the Aswan International Sculpture Symposium, and turned his home near Giza into a museum.
Updated 3 min read
A visit to the museum
Adam Henein was born in Cairo in 1929 into a Coptic family; his father was a craftsman who worked in metal. When he was eight, a school trip to the Egyptian Museum showed him the statues of the pharaohs, and he decided to become a sculptor. He studied sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo, graduating in 1953, and then held a scholarship in Luxor in the mid-1950s and another in Munich from 1957.
Simplicity
From the start Henein looked for the essential. In the 1960s he made a series of animals — roosters, cats, dogs, goats, owls and donkeys — in reference to ancient statuary, and birds remained a recurring theme. His sculptures of people, owls, cats, donkeys and birds are reduced to a few smooth volumes and clean outlines, with the stillness and weight of ancient Egyptian statues but without imitating them. He worked in clay, bronze and, above all, in granite, the stone of the pharaohs, and the pieces often seem to be listening or waiting.
He was also a painter. In Paris he developed a distinctive way of painting on papyrus with natural dyes mixed with gum or gypsum, in muted earth colours, creating abstract and semi-abstract compositions, and he is credited with reviving the technique.
How to look at a Henein: walk round the piece and look at the silhouette from each side. The pieces are so reduced that the outline carries everything, so a bird or an owl changes character as the light moves across the polished stone. Then look at the surface, where he often leaves a contrast between smooth and rough. This reading is the site's own.
Paris and return
In 1971 Henein moved to Paris with his wife, the anthropologist Afaf Al-Dib, and lived there for many years, exhibiting widely in Europe, before returning to Egypt in the 1990s. He held solo exhibitions in Cairo, Alexandria, Amsterdam, London, Paris and Rome. From 1989 to 1998 (one source says 1996) he led the design team for the restoration of the Great Sphinx at Giza, appointed by the Minister of Culture Farouk Hosny; his eye as a sculptor helped the restorers understand how the monument had been carved. The Egyptian government recognised his service in 1998. Earlier restoration work, begun in 1982, had been halted after it caused damage, so his work was the later effort.
In 1996 he founded the Aswan International Sculpture Symposium, which each year brings sculptors from around the world to carve the local granite, and which he led for more than twenty years. The works made there now form an open-air museum overlooking the Nile.
Museum and legacy
In January 2014 his home and studio in Harraniya, near Giza, opened as the Adam Henein Museum, with hundreds of his sculptures and paintings. He received Egypt's highest arts awards, and his work is in the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art as well as in his own museum. He died in Cairo in May 2020; The Art Newspaper, which ran an obituary by the curator Rose Issa, gives his age as 91, The National as 90. He is seen as the heir of Mahmoud Mokhtar, who first tried to give ancient Egyptian sculpture a modern life.
Where to see the work
The Adam Henein Museum in Harraniya, near Giza, is the first place to go, since it holds his work and was his home and studio. The sculptures made at the Aswan symposium stand in the open air above the Nile. Check opening times and access before you travel, because we have not confirmed current visiting arrangements.
See also
Mahmoud Mokhtar; the painter Mahmoud Saïd; North African art; and our lists of Egyptian sculptors and Egyptian artists.
