Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021) was a defining figure of Egyptian modernism whose practice unfolded through a continuous process of metamorphosis. Across more than seven decades, figures, houses, cities and landscapes shifted between recognition and abstraction, allowing Sirry to respond to a changing Egypt while continually reinventing the terms of her painting. Transformation was embedded in both the subject and structure of Sirry’s work. Her early compositions brought figures and their surroundings into tightly compressed pictorial spaces, where bold contours and saturated colour established a distinctive sense of rhythm. As her work developed, the boundaries between body and architecture became increasingly unstable: figures merged with houses, houses fractured into geometric forms, and these structures eventually opened onto the expanses of the desert. Rather than abandoning figuration for abstraction, Sirry repeatedly allowed one to emerge from the other. Colour remained a constant throughout, carrying much of the emotional and spatial intensity of paintings in which forms appear perpetually capable of becoming something else. Born in Cairo, Sirry graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the Higher Institute for Girls in 1948 before continuing her studies in Paris, Rome and at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She later taught painting at Helwan University and the American University in Cairo. Over the course of her career, Sirry exhibited extensively in Egypt and internationally, including at the Venice, São Paulo and Alexandria biennials, and received numerous national and international honours. Her work is held in significant institutional collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, Cairo; the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; and the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris.