Cathy Lomax discovers the work of Huda Lutfi at Gypsum Gallery, Frieze London 2026
One of the first booths I encountered when I entered the Frieze London tent belonged to Cairo-based Gypsum Gallery and featured a group show of Egyptian female artists. When I walked out of Frieze Masters, many hours later, the surrealist collages of Huda Lutfi, a cultural historian and self-taught artist based in Cairo, stayed with me just as other work I had admired seemed to evaporate from my memory.
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| Huda Lutfi, When Dreams Call for Silence, 2018, mixed media, at Gypsum Gallery booth, Frieze London |
Huda Lutfi's When Dreams Call for Silence, first shown in Cairo in 2019, is a series of surrealist collages set in a domestic setting which reflect personal questions and familial concerns and explore silence and other metaphors for death. In these striking works severed heads rest on the floor, shoes wait beside empty beds and mirrored surfaces, resembling tombs, reflect distant faces. They were made in the tumultuous aftermath of Egypt's 2011 and 2013 revolutions and in line with the conflicting feelings that these destabilising (but also longed for) events must have elicited, the series moves between dream and nightmare. The work depicts a retreat into what the gallery text describes as a ‘space of solitude, where the home becomes sanctuary and estrangement at once’.
Huda Lutfi, Cat outside bed, 2018, Mixed media on paper, 50 x 58 cm
There are a number of intersecting visual lures that drew me to Lufti’s work. Her collages at Gypsum Gallery are all contained in what at first glance appear to be vintage frames, closer looking reveals that most of the frames are identical, probably new, and have ornate details that mimic designs of the early twentieth century. This positions this 2018 series alongside female surrealists from an earlier period (such as Gertrude Abercrombie, Toyen, Valentine Hugo or Jane Graverol). Lufti’s colour palette for the works is almost exclusively washed out – a soft pink chair, a mauve floor, a greying blue wall – and they are hung in a cluster emphasising a collective meaning, which does not stridently reveal itself but requires close looking. The work I am most drawn to features an image of a woman on the back of the forementined pink chair. She bears a resemblance to the young Queen Elizabeth II, a powerful image from our collective unconcious, but I suspect she represents the artist. On the floor beside the chair are a tumbling pile of severed heads, all of which have the same queenly features of the woman on the chair. All of the heads have downcast eyes. Is she sleeping, modestly avoiding our gaze, or refusing to look at the horrors that surround her? As over 2,000 people died in the revolutions in Egypt the title When Dreams Call for Silence suggests the latter.
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| Huda Lutfi, Pink Boudoir, 2018, Mixed media on paper, 58 x 49 cm |
The political regime that took control of Egypt in 2014 and is still in place today is described by many commentators as authoritarian.Thus although these works may be based on events in 2011 and 2013, they were made in 2018, first shown in 2019, and continue to resonate in this 2026 showing.
A Frieze report from The Art Newspaper decried the conservative nature of much of the work presented by the big galleries, particularly the ‘anodyne painting’.* Huda Lutfi’s work may have an initial allure derived from its figurative familiarity and female coded subjectivity, but it is, I would suggest, far more politically sophisticated than the ‘challenging’ work produced by the strident provocateurs who The Art Newspaper think missing from this year’s fair. But then Gypsum Gallery’s stand was positioned alongside the Focus section, where, as the report also notes, the work of less established and younger artists was pushing new ideas, and I would suggest, was often subtle and thoughtful. It is in the company, beyond the blue-chip financial anxieties, that the 78-year-old Lutfi comfortably sits, engaged in the real world.
*Kabir Jhala, 'The Week in Art', The Art Newspaper podcast, 16 October 2024
Cathy Lomax
October 2026
Frieze London, The Regents Park, London
14-18 October 2026
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