Safarkhan Art Gallery

Safarkhan takes its name from the Arabic safar, journey, and khan, abode, and describes itself as having been, since 1968, a patron, purveyor, educator and custodian of Egyptian fine art. It was founded and is owned by Sherwet Shafei, who led arts and culture programming on Egypt's Channel 2 before building the gallery around modern Egyptian art. Shafei knew many of the Modernist generation personally, among them Mahmoud Said, Ragheb Ayad, Hamed Nada, Salah Abdel Kerim and Abdel Hadi El Gazzar, and the gallery says she was the first to give several of them solo exhibitions.

The gallery calls its approach "curatorial before commercial". Its season mixes homages to Modernists, such as the 2025 centenary show for Salah Abdel Kerim and the reintroduction of figures like Youssef Sida, Kamal Khalifa and El Hussein Fawzi, with solo shows by a stable of contemporary artists including Mohamed Abla, Anna Boghiguian, Ahmed Farid, Katherine Bakhoum, Ibrahim Khatab, Ashraf El Zamzami and Neama El Sanhoury. The founder's own collection is the subject of the book Twentieth Century Egyptian Art: The Private Collection of Sherwet Shafei, by Mona Abaza.