“I connect his work to Egyptian popular culture, the same way that Warhol is American popular culture. He wanted to communicate something, and it wasn’t about nostalgia or politics. It was about how artists manage to overcome tensions in order to be creative.” - Rose Issa

The master of Egyptian Pop Art, Chant Avedissian fuses commercial popular culture and traditional arts in his iconic commentaries on the world around him. Avedissian was born in Cairo to an Armenian refugee family. After studying abroad at the School of Art and Design in Montreal and applied arts at the National Higher School of Decorative Arts in Paris, the artist begun a career in costume and textiles. However, in 1991, a friend commissioned him to create a portrait of renowned Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum (see note to lot 66). This inspired his Icons of the Nile series, which sought to capture the culture, romance and glamour of mid-twentieth century cosmopolitan Egypt through portraits of influential Egyptian figures.

Sourced from popular magazine imagery, Avedissian combined his stencils with a cultural and historical traditional visual language including Ottoman patterns and hieroglyphics alongside local imagery including bus tickets and birds and worked exclusively in local materials such as Egyptian corrugated cardboard. Avedissian’s devotion to handicraft, tradition and everyday experience in his artistic depictions of the cult of celebrity and the media-age sets his works distinctly apart from the aesthetics of mass-production which characterised American Pop Art.