Hamed Abdalla was a pioneer of Egyptian and Arab modernism. A self taught artist from a modest peasant family in upper Egypt, he rose to prominence early in his career. Abdalla started painting at the age of 10 inspired by his fellahs' environment. Later his work centred on his development of what he called 'the Creative word', Arabic words expressed in paint, blending abstraction and human forms to create visual forms that expressed the meaning of those words.

He held his first solo exhibition in 1941, before going on to show widely throughout Egypt in the 1940s including a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art Cairo (1949), when art critics, such as Badr Eddine Abu Ghazi, considered his work as a new school for Egyptian Art. ...