The works of 83-year-old Egyptian painter Kamal Youssef not only enrich audiences through daily themes, but additionally challenges them to interact and respond.

While many Egyptian artists awoke to the last century by continuing to maintain ancient themes, with political, social and cultural turmoil pervading every sphere art also began to show expressions of national identity and freedom from foreign oppression.

One of the early graduates of the Cairo’s School of Fine Arts - created in 1908 by Prince Kamal as the first of its kind in the Arab world - was Kamal Youssef, or Kamal as he prefers to be known.

Born in 1923 in Cairo, he attended progressive secondary schools, but spent summers at his father’s family village in the countryside near the Nile, with the vast differences observed between basic farm life and urban privilege inspiring him in his artistic creations.

Learning social consciousness from his grandfather - Imam of the district mosque and grandson of the head of Al-Azhar, an esteemed Islamic school originally founded in the 10th century – Kamal’s artistic talents were recognised and nurtured early on. However instead of sending him to train at an arts academy, his pragmatic father, a successful textile merchant, persuaded him to take an engineering degree, with Kamal acknowledging that as engineering and art concern concept and design “mentally, it’s the same process,” with it helping enhance his works as “a defined centre of gravity is important to both art and engineering.”

In many ways, Kamal represents an important historic and artistic intersection of Middle Eastern and Western cultures, for amidst the political and cultural ferment of British occupied Egypt, early in his career he joined a small group of young artists full of passionate new ideas.

Calling themselves the Groupe de L’Art Contemporain, they created a reaction in Egypt and in the international community for unlike other artists their works did not depict tourist scenes.

“My first exhibit was with this group, an act that gave me the energy and courage to develop my own artistic expression and to focus as a painter on the life struggle of the working poor in Egypt, especially those who worked the land,” he says.

Among the first Muslim artists to exhibit in the West, Kamal, represented Egypt in the International Biennales in Venice in 1950, and two years later in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In the same year The Museum of Modern Art in Cairo mounted his one-man show, and he also exhibited in the Biennale in Alexandra in 1955.

In 1954, with eight other L’Art Contemporain group members Kamal was invited by two French newspapers to exhibit at a prominent Parisian gallery, with him accompanying the display to the French capital as the group’s representative and remaining there until 1956 when he moved to the United States.

Despite successfully working as a civil engineer while he and his wife raised their three children, Kamal’s need to paint and express his artistic vision continued on a daily basis.

In 1989 Kamal moved to a country home he and his family had built in rural Pennsylvania, and in 2002 he added a new studio.

Admitting he is “still drawn daily to the canvas,” Kamal’s paintings depict figures showered with pathos, sensuality and humour through a complex understanding of colour and easy use of bold forms.

The influence of Egypt’s cultural heritage is evident in his paintings through searing colours, flattened planes, reduced compositions and figures rendered frontally or in profile, with most of his work figural, predominantly featuring women.

Describing women as “a symbol of life,” he often places them in juxtaposition with an animal.