Mohamed Ewiss – an Egyptian painter exhibits in Pankow

In January 1960, the Egyptian artist Mohamed Ewiss (1919 – 2011) exhibited thirteen paintings at the culture house “Erich Weiner” in the Berlin neighborhood Pankow. Over 5,000 people visited according to the sculptor Heinz Worner, who had helped found the “art club” eight years earlier. Multiple national newspapers, such as Sonntag, Neues Deutschland, und Norddeutsche Zeitung, reported on the exhibition and the Dresden publisher Verlag der Kunst dedicated an issue of the “Contemporary Artists” series to Ewiss. The Fisherman (1958), an oil painting in the style of Socialist Realism depicting the port of Alexandria’s brawny workers was purchased by the GDR’s Academy of Arts. The exhibition’s success, which was great for such a small community initiative, resulted from many years of preparation. Worner initially met Ewiss in 1957. Together with Fritz Cremer, who wrote the introduction for the “Contemporary Artists” volume, they visited Ewiss’s atelier in 1959 when they travelled to Cairo for a group exhibiton of East-German artists.

Immediatly before his exhibition in Pankow, Ewiss had a six-month scholarship in Poland. Thus, his biography is an important component of a history of networks between European socialist countries and the United Arab Republic.

This text is a guest contribution by Tobias Yale Rosen, postgraduate student at Freie Universität Berlin (December 2022).