In his highly - coloured, irresistible stencilled images, Egyptian - Armenian artist Chant Avedissian - who refined his techniques in Western art schools and whose inspiration is fuelled by the pantheon of Egypt's modern political - cultural Golden Age - deftly explores the boundaries between "high" and "ow" art, politics and pop, the ephemeral and the enduring, and Egypt and the rest of the world.

Avedissian's subject is, in fact, images, themselves, mostly appropriated from the covers of Egyptian magazines from an era, situated roughly between king Farouk's early days and President Nasser's death, when that country was the most determined among all the Arab states pursuing the ideal of modernity.

The brightly burning stars who blaze once again in Avedissian's monotypes include legendary singers Om Kalsoum and Asmahan, screen sirens Shadia and Hind Rostom, heartthrobs Farid Al-Attrash and Abdel Halim Hafez, and once - adored statesmen like Nasser and Haile Selassie.

Avedissian's voracious appetite for glimpses of these bygone days, and his unerring synthesis of the themes and iconography of Egypt and the Arab world in the 1950's and 1960's, also takes in mothers, sportsmen and women, soldiers, films, hieroglyphics, rural life and advertising.

Rose Issa