Hassan Soliman

Hassan Soliman Ahmed was born in Cairo in 1928. The Egyptian Ministry of Culture's Fine Art Sector gives an exact birth date of 17 September 1928, though at least one other biographical account narrows the date only to a range in late August to early September 1928, so the precise day should be treated with some caution.

He earned a BA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1951, then spent 1952 to 1953 as a painter in residence at the state-administered Luxor Atelier in Upper Egypt. His first solo exhibition opened in Cairo in 1952, sponsored by the Alumni Union of the Faculty of Fine Arts. In the early 1960s he traveled to Milan to undertake postgraduate studies described as "Psychology of the Fourth Dimension" at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, a period of study associated with 1966. His 1962 painting Work in the Field won a prize in a state-organized exhibition on rural Egyptian life; the Fine Art Sector CV lists a related prize under a different year, 1964, a discrepancy that has not been resolved across sources.

Beyond painting, Soliman worked as a scenographer for Egypt's National Theatre in the late 1950s and early 1960s, taught at the Open University and the Cinema Institute, and wrote extensively on art and literature. He painted for roughly six decades, producing works including The Seamstress and Geese alongside Work in the Field. His late painting The Last Supper remained in his studio for years before he donated it to the Pharos Art Collection about six months before his death; it was reportedly on view there in 2010. Hassan Soliman died in 2008. The Fine Art Sector CV gives an exact date of 18 August 2008 in Cairo, while other sources, including Arabic Wikipedia and a contemporary obituary, cite 15 August 2008 instead. Every major biographical source agrees on the year and on Egypt as his country of death, but the exact day is unresolved between these two conflicting dates.

Institutions rather than individual named critics have shaped Soliman's public reputation. Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art, and Bibliotheca Alexandrina both frame him as part of the vanguard generation of Egyptian painters active from the early 1960s onward, valued for turning scenes of rural labor and everyday life into a considered, socially engaged modernism. No verbatim, attributable quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, and none is included here rather than risk misquoting him.

Soliman's public auction record is sparse relative to his institutional standing. The highest price reported for his work is USD 171,750 for The Last Supper at Christie's Dubai, a result described in Gulf Business and CairoScene coverage as a record price for the artist at auction. The exact sale date could not be confirmed from available sources, and this figure could not be independently corroborated against auction-database aggregators such as ArtChart, Artsy, or MutualArt, which show only a limited public sales history for the artist. Beyond this result, those same platforms list his market presence but do not publish a comprehensive price history, and no source offers the kind of repeat-sale data used to chart trend lines for better-tracked artists.

Soliman's work is held across a genuine spread of institutions, including Egypt's own Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Pharos Art Collection, Dubai's civic and private collections, and the Dalloul Art Foundation in Beirut, which supports his historical standing. At the same time, there is no catalogue raisonne, the two Cairo galleries most closely tied to his work today, Al Masar Gallery and ArtTalks, are not confirmed as formal exclusive estate representatives, and the public auction record consists of a single press-reported high-value result rather than a deep, independently verified price history. Collectors should also note that his exact birth date rests on a single official source that is contradicted by a broader range estimate elsewhere, and his exact death date is contested between two specific dates, 15 and 18 August 2008, across otherwise agreeing sources.