Press
*Menhat Helmy’s archival press clippings between 1953-2010 are available upon request from the Menhat Helmy Estate. Below are the more recent articles and reviews since the estate was established in 2019.
2024
Trailblazers: Menhat Helmy bridges worlds through art [Arab News]
From scenes of local village life to images inspired by the cosmos, the late Egyptian modern artist Menhat Helmy’s oeuvre was a varied one.
Journey Across Artistic Realms: The Legacy of Egyptian Contemporary Artist Menhat Helmy [About Her]
The late Egyptian contemporary artist Menhat Helmy had an exceptionally broad artistic career that included everything from portraying idyllic landscapes of rural life to exploring the mysteries of space.
2023
The Legacy of Menhat Helmy: An Egyptian Pioneer of Graphics and Printmaking [Egyptian Streets]
“Through careful brushstrokes and delicate handwork, Menhat Helmy created a world of art that is distinguished and everlasting. With paintings steeped in color and wonder, Helmy was a pioneer whose talent and influence continue to reverberate through the artistic industry today.”
Kawkaba sings the songs of lost constellations [Middle East Institute]
The exhibition deftly captures this historical moment, opening with a “space age” series of works including Egyptian artist Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar’s early 1960s oil on canvas Two People in Space Outfits. Here two slightly androgynous figures in “space suits” — one more male and one more female in appearance — contemplate a brave new decade. The painting is accompanied by two other works of note by women artists: Lebanese painter Samia Osseiran Jumblatt’s 1970 painting Formative Radiation, depicting two planetary orbs that evoke the embryonic union of mother and child, and Egyptian artist Menhat Helmy’s 1973 oil on canvas Space Exploration/Universe celebrating the cosmos as an infinite radial grid of blues and reds. The revelation of these women artists feels like the birth of an unknown star in an often-male-dominated art world universe.
افتتاح معرض "رؤى تجريدية" لنازلي مدكور ومنحة الله حلمي بمكتبة الإسكندرية
وقالت الفنانة نازلي مدكور، إن فكرة وجود معرض بمكتبة الإسكندرية لها وللفنانة منحة الله يعتبر شرفا كبيرا، فمكتبة الإسكندرية تعتبر صرحا ثقافيا عالميا مهما، كما أكدت سعادتها بإقامة المعرض مع الفنانة منحة الله حلمي مؤكدة أنها فنانة لم تنل العرض الكافي والدراسة الكافية لأعمالها فهي فنانة رائدة في فن الجرافيك.
مكتبة الإسكندرية تحتفى بـ نازلى مدكور ومنحة الله حلمى
وتمثل كل من الفنانتين جيلين مختلفين فى تاريح الحركة التشكيلية المصرية، وتجمع بينهما النزعة التجريدية التى تتخذ أشكالا عضوية (نباتية) فى أعمال نازلى، بينما تتخذ أشكالا هندسية فى أعمال منحة الله، ويقدم لنا المعرض بذلك حالتين مختلفتين لرؤية العالم اتسمت كل منهما بالجسارة والتفرد، فقد امتلكت كل من الفنانتين الشجاعة لارتياد عالم التجريد وكانت لكل منهما طريقتها الخاصة فى التعبير.
2022
The Artist Who Captured a Bygone Cairo [Newlines Mag]
Against a backdrop of dilapidated, misshaped buildings lies a series of wooden houseboats moored along the shores of the Nile River. The two-story structures steady themselves with tranquil buoyancy, untroubled by the rippling river, while their occupants drift through open terraces overlooking the green banks, relishing simple joys uncommon in a city as chaotic as Cairo.
There is an outdated grace to these floating homes — an unlikely paradise besieged by a sprawling mass of concrete. They adorn the local landscape, hearkening back to a time before the dull-gray skyscrapers that flank the Nile’s western bank; a time when homes such as these were at the heart of a thriving Cairene culture, hosting late-night salons, intellectual debates and a refuge for society’s elite looking to escape the conservative capital.
Artist Estates: Menhat Helmy [Selection Arts]
Helmy’s early work was marked by socialist undertones and revolutionary themes. She frequently painted and etched workers, peasants, women, as well as elaborate urban and rural scenes in Cairo. Later, she turned to abstraction and employed geometry to create works inspired by the exploration of space and technological advancements such as the computer. While Helmy’s earlier work was representative of this political style, her later abstraction stepped far outside its bounds and into new frontiers that were yet to be extensively explored in Egyptian art.
Remembering Menhat Helmy: My beloved, progressive grandmother [The National]
Something had clicked during my visit home in 2019 – maybe it was the cacophony of Cairene street sounds mixed with the omnipresence of Umm Kulthum’s songs, the constant gaze of the Pyramids, the sweet taste of strong tea, the friendly faces from my childhood. Maybe I had packed this sorrowful nostalgia in tight cellophane wrapping that had come loose because it had to be felt. I knew I had to save Nanna’s work and I had to do it right now.
2020
Menhat Helmy: Reclaiming the Legacy of an Egyptian Modernist [Art & Object]
My aunt Nihal, who was two years older than my mother, was responsible for the event and its eventual success. She worked with renowned sculptor and curator Ehab El-Laban to bring the retrospective to life, which included the Herculean task of archiving and cataloguing hundreds of artworks. As a successful businesswoman and art lover, she assumed the responsibility of managing the estate, and her first order of business had been the retrospective in tribute to her mother. Sadly, it was also one of the last things my aunt would do.
Nihal was killed in a tragic car accident in September 2007. Her loss devastated our family and dimmed any grand plans we may have had for my grandmother’s estate. My family, comprised of my single mother and younger brother, left Egypt and emigrated to Canada, taking with us only a handful of my grandmother’s works. The rest went into storage, and would not see the light of day for many years.
The Activism of Arab Women Artists [CCAS, Georgetown Uni]
Perhaps no other artists exemplified political activism thought art more than Inji Eflatoun (1924-1989), who used her paintbrush to depict historic cases of British injustice towards Egyptians, including the notorious Denshway massacre that took place following an altercation between Egyptian peasants and British soldiers. In somber black and white ink, Eflatoun depicts a scene from the massacre of a peasant being hung under the watchful eyes of British troops. She would go on to spend more than four years in jail for her political activism, producing dozens of works that captured the solitude and desperation of her fellow female inmates. At the height of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s ambitious Aswan Dam project, a number of women artists including Effat Nagi, Tahia Halim, Menhat Helmy, and Gazbia Sirry documented the round-the-clock construction, as well as the “resettlement” of tens of thousands of Nubians who were displaced by the project.
Rediscovering Menhat Helmy, Egypt’s pioneering printmaker [Sekka Mag]
At the end of January, Karim Zidan stood before a blue geometric oil painting by his grandmother, the late Egyptian artist Menhat Helmy, at the Grey Art Gallery in New York. The Canadian-Egyptian journalist was in town for the opening night of Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World 1950s–1980s, an exhibition of nearly 90 works drawn from the collection of Sharjah’s Barjeel Art Foundation.
Around him, art lovers converged to discuss their own interpretations of the artwork, painted in 1973 and titled Space Exploration/Universe. “I heard someone say it was electrical currents flowing through a circuit board; others said it was the night sky; others said it was planets, or the entire universe. There were just remarkable perspectives,” Karim says.
إعادة اكتشاف منحة حلمي: رائدة الطباعة الفنية في مصر
في نهاية شهر يناير الماضي، وقف كريم زيدان أمام لوحة زيتية هندسية زرقاء اللون بريشة جدته الفنانة المصرية منحة حلمي في صالة غراي آرت غاليري Grey Art Gallery بنيويورك؛ فقد كان الصحفي الكندي المصري موجودًا بالدولة لحضور حفل افتتاح معرض بعنوان “تبلور الفن التجريدي في العالم العربي بين خمسينيات وثمانينيات القرن العشرين” Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World 1950s–1980s، الذي يضم قرابة ٩٠ عملاً فنيًا مرسومًا ضمن مجموعة مؤسسة بارجيل للفنون بالشارقة.
ومن حوله، التقى عشاق الفن لمناقشة تفسيراتهم الخاصة للعمل الفني بعنوان “استكشاف الفضاء والكون” Space Exploration/Universe المرسوم عام 1973. يقول كريم: “سمعت شخصًا يقول إنَّه يعبّر عن مرور التيارات الكهربائية في لوحة دائرة كهربائية، وقال آخرون إنَّه يعبّر عن السماء ليلاً، في حين قال آخرون إنَّه يعبّر عن الكواكب أو الكون بأسره. كانت هناك وجهات نظر غير عادية !”.
Artist Spotlight: Menhat Helmy and the Path to Space [Grey Art Gallery]
As in the rest of New York City, the crowd at the Grey Art Gallery was dense and tightly packed, a mixture of ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities gathered together at the opening reception for the exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World 1950s–1980s, which took place on January 30, 2020. Drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, UAE, this historic show explores the evolution of abstraction in the region through nearly 90 paintings, prints, and sculpture by leading Arab artists. Among the works on view is a painting by my grandmother, Menhat Helmy (1925–2004), a pioneering printmaker who belonged to the “golden generation” of modern Egyptian artists.
Blue Collar: Depiction of Workers in Modern Arab Art [Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi]
An equal champion of the working class was artist Inji Eflatoun (1924-1989) who was born into an upper middle class family in Cairo, and married communist prosecutor Hamdi Aboul Ela. Eflatoun’s activism for women and labour rights landed her a four plus year jail term. However, her spirit was relentless and she continued to depict workers in countless paintings, including The Builders (1952) and White Gold (1963) that comes from a series of cotton pickers that she painted in the 1960s. Similarly, Eflatoun’s contemporary Menhat Helmy (1925-2004) painted a composition called Procession to Work (1957), showing a group of male and female workers carrying tools, and marching behind a man holding a white pigeon—a popular symbol for peace. While professor of sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo Gamal Al Sagini’s (1917-1977) bronze piece titled Nasser (1960) depicts the Egyptian leader being supported by workers and peasants, representing different industries. The message is clear, workers amongst others, stand by Nasser and thus the president’s strength is derived from them.
2019
Forgotten female artists of Modern Arab art to get their due in Sharjah show [The Art Newspaper]
Collecting art by female Modern artists in the Middle East has been a challenge, according to Al Qassemi. A dearth of scholarship in the field has led to less conventional research methods. “I’ve found most of the latest acquisitions through social media,” says Al Qassemi. He found the work of the Iraqi artist Naziha Salim, the sister of the well-known painter Jewad Selim, on Instagram and purchased a painting for his collection. Having heard of the Egyptian artist Menhat Helmy, he posted on Twitter asking for more information and ended up in touch with her grandson, who is now documenting her previously untouched body of work in Cairo. "Her work is mind-blowing: she did portraits, she made abstract work, she did political work—previously there were only three lines about her on the Internet," Al Qassemi says. Her paintings Space Exploration/Universe (1973) and Outpatient Clinic (1958) are now in the Barjeel collection.
«الحفيد» ينفض الغبار عن إبداع «منحة حلمى»
منحة حلمي، المبدعة المنسية التى يسعى حفيدها كريم زيدان، بعد 15 عاما مرت على رحيل الفنانة التشكيلية ورائدة الرسم حفرا على ألواح «الزينك»، أن ينفض الغبار عن إرث وتاريخ يستحق أن يبعث حيا. ولدت منحة 1925 وكانت الابنة الوسطى بين سبعة من الأشقاء والشقيقات، تميزت بينهم بشغفها الفنى الذى بلغ بها عتبات مدرسة سليد للفنون فى لندن، التى درست بها ثلاثة أعوام قبل أن تعود إلى مصر منتصف الخمسينيات.