“I have nature, art, and poetry, and if that’s not enough, what is?” Vincent van Gogh, Dutch painter, Once He said.
It only takes a few minutes after logging in Van Gogh exhibitionrunning through June 2026 in District 5, in order to truly and wholeheartedly understand what he meant when he said that nature, art, and poetry can sometimes, and often do, be all one needs to feel good.
Once you enter the gallery, you feel completely separate from the world we all inhabit, and you enter the world of a painter who, despite the cruel, ugly and inhuman experiences he went through, still creates a world of his own that looks at nature with a close eye, and still chooses to love the beauty of nature even in the midst of the ugliness of his world.
So far, in the first few weeks since its opening, the exhibition has attracted many fans, especially from the art community in Egypt. Egyptian artists love Yusuf Hanbalwho spent years studying Van Gogh’s works at university and his relationship with nature, had long been waiting for an exhibition like this to be held in Egypt.
“I have always wanted something like this to be done in Egypt,” he said. “Van Gogh’s story is incredibly emotional, and it is very exciting to finally have this exhibition for artists like me here.”
“In one of my university projects, I explored augmented reality to reimagine the works of Egyptian artists and how Egyptian paintings could be presented through virtual reality. I would like to see something like this done for Egyptian artists as well.”
Sincere love for nature
The story of Van Gogh’s exhibition is actually less about his life story than about his own on Falling in love with nature, and thus falling in love with the simple pleasures of existence.
No matter what happened to him in his personal life, no matter all the challenges he faced, all these events and feelings somehow disappear when met with the magnificence and beauty of nature.
One of his favorites Places The painting was in nearby olive groves, outside the Saint-Paul asylum in southern France. Through his eyes, olive trees become an expression of an existence that is bigger than himself and bigger than the current moment he is in as he sits to paint them.
Even as he sits to paint their beauty, the olive trees feel as if they exist beyond his measurement of time. They have lived hundreds, even thousands, of years, and carry memories or a presence that existed long before him and his painting.
“The breath of the olive grove has something so intimate and so ancient in it. It is so beautiful to me that I dare not paint it.” – Van Gogh He said While writing to his brother.
And in his paintings of nature, whether in the intense yellow sunflower or the fragile bloom of almond branches against a clear blue sky, there is a sense of rawness and emotion that no artificial being can generate.
To look at nature, as he did, is to return to the same roughness within ourselves, the uneven edges, broken lines, and imperfections that reveal how complex the layers of the world really are. It would be utter foolishness to view nature superficially, or to fail to at least consider how it came to be.
Even as his mind became more disturbed, he did not turn away from this world. He came closer to her, losing himself in the texture of the leaves, in the symmetrical lines of the branches, in the order that nature seemed to hold.
He never stopped looking at the sunrise every morning and thinking that it greeted him; To look at nature with the eyes of a familiar friend who never tires of thanking it for its beauty, and never tires of feeling grateful just for being next to the beauty of the sunrise.
And in that moment, he realizes that this is the most powerful expression of life, which is to love nature.
He once said: “If I did not feel love for nature and my work, I would not be happy.” He said.
There could not be a more appropriate time for this exhibition, at a time when artificial nature overwhelms the rawness of nature, and where it is too often destroyed and exploited rather than nurtured.
If Van Gogh were alive today, he might remind us never to forget to admire nature, or to tire of it, because no matter how familiar or expected a sunrise may be, it still seems more beautiful than the one before it.