Inji Efflatoun

Critical text

Raised by a single mother in the milieu of Egypt s military ruling class, Inji Efflatoun (1924 1989, Cairo) was an influential feminist painter. Young Efflatoun was active in Marxist circles and explored surrealism s political potential through her paintings. She made her debut in the surrealist group Art et Libert , a rebellious coalition of Egyptian avant-gardes who espoused international surrealism as a model of anti-fascist resistance. Asserting the presence of women in national life was central to her agitation against imperialism, and her psychologically charged work became a direct expression of her politics. Her work often engaged class and gender consciousness, and included women, labour and rural landscapes as her subject matter. Due to her participation in the Communist Party of Egypt, she was imprisoned for four years, during which time she continued to create art, with whatever materials were available to her. Her paintings go far beyond her political aspirations; in her words, they were conceived to vibrate with life . After the surrealist-inspired paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, her more mature and lyrical works feature an idiosyncratic palette coupled with her very essential figuration, always on the edge of dissolving into abstraction. These works were characterised by transfigured, vibrant colours, applied with quick, isolated brushstrokes on an exposed canvas. In the later part of her life, the light emerging from the white canvas gained in prominence, giving her bucolic scenes a sense of haunting nostalgia.

Text by Defne Ayas

The artist’s voice

The experience of prison revealed the importance of nature to me. Before 1959, I concentrated on expressing the personality, the human being. It was rare for me to paint a painting of nature alone, for itself. But when I was deprived of it, I felt how precious it was. It became a symbol of freedom in my eyes.