A comprehensive introduction to the diverse visionary oeuvre of a nomadic polymath

A painter, poet, printmaker and critic, New York–based Egyptian artist Ahmed Morsi (born 1930) has created a diverse body of work ranging from paintings and artist’s books to prints and photographs. Coming of age in the 1940s as part of the Alexandria School, a movement led by free thinkers and artists that marked the city’s emergence as a postwar Mediterranean cultural port city, Morsi spent time in Baghdad, where he benefited from the city’s vibrant literary renaissance of the 1960s, as an art critic and translator, before settling in Cairo, and eventually immigrating to New York in the mid-1970s. A Dialogic Imagination begins with the artist’s books he created in Cairo and ends with his latest body of work, his photographs of Manhattan.

This volume highlights the rich interplay between Morsi’s poetry, printmaking, photography and paintings.