In Cairo, art sits inside old apartments, villas, Downtown buildings, and spaces that have changed names, owners and identities over the years. And in many cases, the story of the gallery is almost as interesting as the work on its walls.

Some of the spaces below have been around for decades, preserving the legacy of Egyptian modernism. Others are much younger, giving emerging artists room to experiment with everything from painting and sculpture to photography, installation and film. Together, they offer a pretty good way into Cairo’s art scene — past and present.

Zamalek Art Gallery didn’t exactly begin with someone waking up and deciding to open a gallery. Its story goes back to the late 1990s, when Naheda and Noha Khoury were involved in organising an art festival in Aswan, built around the relationship between ancient Egyptian art and contemporary practice. After years of helping artists exhibit around Cairo, the experience pushed them to create a permanent space of their own. Zamalek Art Gallery followed in 1999.

Since then, it has become one of the established names in Egyptian modern and contemporary art. Its roster stretches from major figures such as Gazbia Sirry, Hamed Owais and Gamal El Sagini to younger contemporary artists, with painting and sculpture playing a particularly strong role. The gallery eventually expanded with an annex, allowing it to show established artists and newer voices at the same time — which says quite a lot about how it sees its role in Cairo’s art scene.

Zahwa belongs to a much younger chapter of Cairo’s gallery scene. Its Downtown programme began taking shape in 2024, with founder and manager Ghada Hassan building the space around contemporary Egyptian and Middle Eastern art, independent curation and a particular interest in introducing collectors to younger artists.

That makes the programme nicely unpredictable. One exhibition might centre on painting and sculpture by recent art-school graduates; another can move into calligraphy, digital work, music or film. Ali Hassaan’s Poorly Made, for example, grew out of three years spent observing cheap toy markets across Egypt, while New Dawn combined storytelling, digital paintings, original music and a short film. Zahwa has also repeatedly given space to emerging artists through projects such as Stars on the Horizon. In other words, it is less about one recognisable house style and more about seeing what a younger generation of artists is doing right now.

Villa Azad is new, but its story started before the villa itself. Before Villa Azad, there was Azad Art Gallery. The gallery opened in Cairo in 2018 with a stated focus on supporting both established names and young artists — its very first exhibition was Esraa Zidan’s colourful, body-positive series The Neighbours of the Rainbow. Over the following years, Azad built a programme spanning figurative and abstract painting, sculpture, photography and installation.

Then, in April 2024, came Villa Azad: a larger Zamalek space conceived as a continuation of that project. The range is still broad. Recent shows have included Khaled Alkhani’s fragmented female figures, Mohamed Banawy’s deeply personal paintings around imagined memories, and group exhibitions built around quieter observations and everyday narratives. Villa Azad also moves beyond an exclusively Egyptian roster, bringing artists from elsewhere in the Arab world into the conversation. It feels less like a radical reinvention of Azad than the same idea given more room to breathe.

To understand Access, you need to know about Townhouse Gallery first. Founded in Downtown Cairo in 1998, Townhouse became one of the city’s most influential independent art institutions — part gallery, part library, part performance space and, importantly, a place where a generation of artists and cultural workers found their footing. After 21 years, it closed in 2019.

Access Art Space opened in 2020 in the same building, run by members of the former Townhouse team. So it isn’t quite Townhouse under another name, but the connection is impossible to miss. And that experimental spirit is still there. Access hosts painting, photography, film, installation and multidisciplinary projects, often touching on the city, politics, climate, identity and social history. Recent programmes have ranged from an exhibition on climate change featuring photography, film and installations to a large-scale exploration of Egyptian photojournalism. It is probably the least conventional gallery on this list — and that is exactly the point.

Safarkhan takes us furthest back. Founded in 1968, it began life dealing largely in Islamic art and objects before collector and curator Sherwet Shafei helped steer it towards modern Egyptian art in the late 1980s. Shafei had already spent years immersed in the scene through her work in Egyptian television, where she met and interviewed some of the country’s major modernists. Those relationships eventually became part of Safarkhan’s DNA.

That history is still very visible. The gallery works closely with Egyptian modernism, showing and preserving works by figures such as Mahmoud Said, Ragheb Ayad, Hamed Nada and Abdel Hadi El Gazzar, while also reviving artists who had slipped out of wider public attention. But Safarkhan isn’t only interested in looking backwards. Since 2000, Shafei’s daughter Mona Said has developed its contemporary programme, bringing artists such as Ibrahim Khatab, Ahmed Saber and Ahmed Farid into the fold. The result is one of the nicest things about Safarkhan: you can see several generations of Egyptian art talking to each other in the same place.