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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 April 2000 Issue No. 477 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 April 2000 Issue No. 477
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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EGYPTIAN Harvests, currently showing at Cairo Berlin, is a selection of Margo Veillon's work from the 30's to the late 60's. In the book -- published by AUC -- that accompanies the exhibition, the artist provides her own distillation of method: "In my sketches, drawn on the spot and in motion, I am myself -- that is, I don't know whether or not I am aware of what I'm doing. It's like a spring that gushes forth, whereas painting makes other demands: it calls for awareness, a critical stand as to the decision to be made."
The majority of pieces in the current show are sketches, all, as the exhibition title suggests, connected with the land. Energetic, observed, relishing movement as much as form, they provide a refreshing counterpoint to the paintings, set pieces that tend towards more formal concerns.
Despite the clarity of observation, it would be foolish to suppose that Veillon's intentions are in any way ethnographic, a point she is herself keen to make: "Only the beauty of their gestures, the purity of their movements, the nobility of their acts -- the humble and miraculous labour of the fellahin working their fields today almost as they did at the start -- matter to me. I am not interested in any sociological interpretations."
Over six decades, in pencil or ink, with washes of colour, Veillon has been capturing that purity of movement with a dexterity unmatched by any of her contemporaries, and with the necessary sense of remove that is all too often lacking in the work of more seemingly committed artists. This small show -- a thematically conceived mini-retrospective -- gathers the fruits of those labours to provide a succinct and enthralling overview of one of the many strands that comprise Veillon's oeuvre. It is a world the artist has made her own.
For full details of the exhibition, see Listings
Nigel Ryan
