The exhibition coincides with the 2022 anniversaries of two key events: the bicentenary of Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs and the centenary of Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

The exhibition will include painting, sculpture, writing, fashion and architecture, alongside photography, film and installation art. It will feature work from artists as wide ranging as Joshua Reynolds, Hector Horeau, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, David Hockney and Chris Ofili alongside works by modern and contemporary Egyptian artists, rarely exhibited in Britain.

The exhibition features two loans from the Henry Moore Foundation's collection, Egyptian Figures I and Egyptian Figures II. Moore first encountered ancient Egyptian sculpture as a student in Leeds when he noted its ‘magnetised stillness’, but it was when he visited the British Museum while studying at the Royal College of Art in the early 1920s that he recorded being especially struck by objects he saw there. Ancient Egyptian objects, and particularly the British Museum’s collections, remained important to Moore throughout his career, something which he alludes to in Egyptian Figures I and Egyptian Figures II. The sculptures of the two standing couples on raised bases evoke ancient Egyptian pair statues which represented a husband and wife, either standing or sitting and depicted in strict frontal view. Despite their diminutive size, Egyptian Figures I and Egyptian Figures II also both evoke the ‘monumentality of vision' which Moore associated with ancient Egyptian sculpture.