Painter and minister · Egypt
Farouk Hosny
Farouk Hosny (born 1938) is an Egyptian abstract painter and former politician. Trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria, he worked as a cultural diplomat in Paris and Rome before serving as Egypt's Minister of Culture from 1987 to 2011, the longest-serving member of Hosni Mubarak's government. In 2009 he was the favourite to become Director-General of UNESCO but lost after controversy over remarks he had made. Through it all he kept painting large, colourful abstractions.
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Alexandria
Farouk Hosny was born in Alexandria in 1938 and grew up in the city, by the sea that he later said shaped his sense of colour and space. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Alexandria University, graduating in 1964, and began to exhibit as a painter.
Paris and Rome
Instead of teaching or living only from painting, he entered cultural administration. After graduating he ran the Al-Anfoushy Cultural Palace in Alexandria from 1969 to 1971, then worked at Egypt's cultural centre in Paris in the 1970s, a decade that put him in touch with European abstract art. In 1979 he moved to Rome as vice-director and then director of the Egyptian Academy. In both cities he kept painting and showing his work, and his style moved from expressionism towards abstraction.
Minister of Culture
In 1987 President Hosni Mubarak appointed him Minister of Culture, a post he held until the revolution of 2011 — almost twenty-four years. He oversaw major projects, among them restorations of Islamic Cairo and of the Great Sphinx, the planning of the Grand Egyptian Museum, new museums and an annual programme of exhibitions and festivals. He appointed the sculptor Adam Henein to lead the design team restoring the Sphinx, and supported the Aswan sculpture symposium Henein founded.
His time in office was also controversial: critics accused the ministry of censorship, and a fire at a theatre in Beni Suef in 2005, which killed dozens of people, led to calls for his resignation. He offered it in September 2005, and President Mubarak reinstated him a few days later. In 2009 he was Egypt's candidate to lead UNESCO and was seen as the favourite, but a remark he had made in parliament about burning Israeli books, for which he later apologised, turned many countries against him. He lost the final vote to Irina Bokova, 31 to 27.
The painter
Hosny has always presented himself first as a painter. His canvases are abstract: broad fields of colour, gestures and textures, sometimes suggesting light, sea or landscape, often in strong reds, blues and earth tones. A good way into the work is an exhibition at the Picasso Gallery in Zamalek, Cairo, of about forty paintings in which, as Ahram Online described it, he treated galaxies and open space as an astronaut might see them; the coverage also noted the vivid colour and the delicate calligraphic marks that build the canvases. Look for those marks as you move across the canvas: the large fields of colour are held together by fine, written-looking lines.
He had shown a new group of paintings at the Zamalek Art Gallery in Cairo in 2007, while still minister. His work has also been shown beyond Egypt. In 1999 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York paired his paintings, about thirty-four of them, with the sculpture of Adam Henein in an exhibition of contemporary Egyptian art, and the Met published a catalogue, Farouk Hosny / Adam Henein: Contemporary Egyptian Artists and Heirs to an Ancient Tradition.
Where to see the work
In January 2026 the Farouk Hosny Foundation for Culture and Arts, which he founded in 2019, opened the Farouk Hosny Museum of Arts in Zamalek, Cairo. It shows his own paintings and his personal collection of Egyptian and international art, with works by Mahmoud Saïd, Adam Henein and Giorgio de Chirico, and has a specialised library. Check the foundation's website for opening hours.
See also
The painters Mahmoud Saïd, also from Alexandria, and Hussein Bicar; the sculptor Adam Henein; and our lists of Egyptian painters and Egyptian artists.
