In The Reader (Portrait of Maha at Twelve), Hamed Ewais departs from the grand social and nationalist narratives that defined much of his oeuvre to create an unusually intimate and prophetic work. The painting portrays his twelve-year-old niece, Maha, deeply absorbed in a book—a quiet image of childhood that, with hindsight, reveals layers of foresight. Behind her, three flowers rise: one fully in bloom, another just emerging, and a smaller bud still delicate. This seemingly incidental motif would come to mirror Maha’s own family decades later—her three daughters.

Tender and luminous, the work speaks not only of familial love but of destiny. The book in Maha’s hands foretells her future vocation, where reading and words would become both livelihood and purpose. Unlike Ewais’s monumental canvases of collective struggle, here the brush conveys intimacy, prophecy, and the universal power of the personal. Rare within the artist’s practice, The Reader transforms a private family portrait into a timeless meditation on fate, vocation, and love.