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Artists' Index
Encyclopedia of Modern Art and Arab World
موســــوعة الفـن الحديـــث والعالــم العربـــي
Artists' Index

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Ahmad Osman

Ahmad Osman, born on 8 July 1907 in Eneiba, Egypt, was a prominent Egyptian sculptor and the founder of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria. He studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Cairo, where he graduated in 1927. After receiving a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, he was appointed professor at the School of Applied Arts in Giza in 1933. He established the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria in 1957 and became its first director. Osman's work was influenced by Italian classicism and he was commissioned to sculpt and decorate several public monuments in Egypt. Osman died on 13 November 1970 in Alexandria, Egypt.
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Hamed Owais

Hamed Owais, born on 8 March 1919 in Beni Soueif, Egypt, is a leading painter of Egyptian social realism and one of the founders of the Egyptian "Group of Modern Art". He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1944 and pursued his studies at the Institute of Art Education. After receiving a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, he served as the head of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria between 1977 and 1979. His work was influenced by the Mexican muralists and portrays the daily life and labor of the Egyptian working class. Owais died on 1 October 2011 in Cairo, Egypt.
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Omar Onsi

​Omar Onsi was born in 1901 in Beirut, Lebanon. Onsi started training in 1920 with Khalil Salibi in Beirut, and continued his education in Paris in the late 1920s at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi. Onsi developed an approach to figurative and landscape representation that he called "realist naturalism" and believed to be highly spiritual. His oil paintings and plein-air watercolors were celebrated for providing a founding iconography for a nascent republican Lebanon. He taught extensively and participated in founding several important nationalist art institutions. His work was commercially successful during his lifetime. Many of his paintings were commissioned to represent Lebanon in government-sponsored events and institutions, and of these, many have since become canonized in post-civil war Lebanon. He died of stomach cancer in Beirut, Lebanon in 1969.
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