His work is most commonly associated with the Art and Liberty Group, a Cairo-based surrealist collective of artists, writers, intellectuals and activists with an anti-nationalist message.
Ramses Younan was born into a poor, Coptic-Christian family in Minya, a city approximately 150 miles south of Cairo and along the western bank of the Nile River.
"[3] In 1938, the Society published his first book The Aim of the Contemporary Artist in which he analyzed the work of the French cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant and his theories of Purism.
[1] In 1939, along with Georges Henein, Ikbal El Alaily, and Edmond Jabès, Ramses Younan founded the surrealist journal La Part du Sable.
After Art and Liberty's demise, Younan worked almost exclusively in an abstract style, most of which was shown in his first solo exhibition held in 1948 at the Gallery Nina Dausset, Paris.
Instead, he called for, what he referred to as, "Subjective Realism" or Free Art, "an active mining of the unconscious fused with local imagery that would be familiar to Egyptians, but not fetishistic or nationalistic.