Mostafa El Razzaz (b. 1942, Cairo) is an Egyptian artist, educator and critic whose work has occupied a distinctive position between modernism and Egypt’s vernacular traditions. Across painting, printmaking, sculpture and assemblage, forms drawn from folk art, popular ritual and the material culture of everyday life recur not as quotations from the past, but as part of a visual culture that El Razzaz understands to be still in formation. El Razzaz came of age at a moment when questions of cultural identity and modernity were being actively negotiated within Egyptian art. His encounter with Nubia in the early 1960s proved formative, sharpening an interest in forms of making that existed beyond the conventions of academic art. This attention to the vernacular would remain with him, though never as a programme of preservation. Horses, puppets, talismans and ornamental forms pass freely between his paintings, prints and objects, repeatedly changing register as they do. What persists is less a stable vocabulary of symbols than a way of working: one in which inherited forms remain open to alteration, humour and invention. El Razzaz graduated from the Higher Institute of Art Education in 1965 and received his MA in Art Education in 1972, before continuing his studies at the University of Oslo and completing his PhD at the State University of New York in 1979. He later became Professor of Design at Helwan University and has held several influential positions within Egyptian cultural life, including Chairman of the Egyptian Society of Folk Art and Chairman of the Visual Arts Committee of the Supreme Council of Culture. Alongside his studio practice, his writing, teaching and research have made him an important interlocutor in debates around Egyptian art, folk culture and visual heritage.