It’s a crazy place to mount an exhibition. After all, few people just happen to stop at the back room of Al-Ahram, next to the paper loading docks, go through the security, past the mosque, down the granite corridor, past the cordoned-off repairs and next to the men’s room?

Yet after all that the First Group Exhibition by the International Artists Support Group (IASG) virtually slams you backward in a burst of light when you first enter it. The works in here feel contemporary, with the lines and palettes of things we’re more used to seeing outside art galleries: print ads, posters, recycled paper products and cartoons. They feature strong lines and blaze with vivid, undiluted colors, modern hues such as lime-green and fuchsia and bright primaries, black-and-white cartoons with bold lines that flow or dance.

Not all the work in here is contemporary —not by a long shot: late greats who fit into the mood of the exhibit are represented too, including the incomparable Salah Taher. But everything is characterized by powerful strokes, bright shades and dynamic compositions, this or the other side of verisimilitude, that seem to call out to each other from the sterile white walls and form a sort of tapestry of bursting life.

Upon hearing that these exhibits were all selected by one person, you’d be forgiven for looking around for the pink-haired punk rocker responsible. Then, up comes this 67-year-old, quiet, unassuming painter with soft, straggly brown hair, dressed in a sky-blue suit with stains down the front, who proceeds to lull you into relaxation with a vague, soft-spoken welcome.

This is Nabil Makar, director of exhibitions for the IASG, a nonprofit outfit that aims to bring artists together worldwide.

Sitting with Makar, you are transported to the gentle rhythms and meandering streams of the Egyptian countryside where he takes pride in having grown up. The sterile white hall fades away as you fall under the spell of his rambling anecdotes. Everything about him is laid-back: his suit, his modesty.

“Really, Egyptians are given very good educations. No sooner do you go abroad than everyone wants to make you a head or director or chairman of something or other. It’s so silly; they would send scouts out to my exhibitions, then I’d find people calling. ‘Would you be the manager of this or that?’ ”

Makar regales me with stories as he shows me around the exhibits.

“This painter is an Armenian. Very, very nice gentleman. There was this Armenian wine company starting up and as a gift, you know, he designed a whole series of wine labels for them, all different paintings, free of charge. They were very grateful and just kept sending him cases and cases of wine, even now. He lives in one of these very big old houses, but still, it’s hard to find space for all the crates. So he makes his friends presents of wine”

On we go through the exhibition, him telling me tidbits about each artist. “This artist is Asian, but he lives in the States. And this,” he says, stopping before a striking painting, “is one of the best-known modern artists in the US today. She cooks paper into a kind of slurry consistency and coats the canvas with it. She’s very famous, but she knows me, and I prevailed upon her to take part in this exhibition.”

He goes on to explain how part of his strength as a curator is to cultivate strong bonds with the artists; this allows him to occasionally approach them for the sake of the exhibition. “They all pay their own insurance, for one thing. As a nonprofit, we could never afford to have all these paintings insured.” Other ingenious solutions include exhibiting photographs of a sculptor’s work, and copies of the Egyptian cartoonists’ works.

When he’s done, he points out his paintings — only two — among the exhibits. A charming innocence pervades them both: The first is a deliberately naive representation of an Egyptian peasant couple, arms around each other, sitting in a stylized field, with a compressed perspective and comforting, cheerful colors; the other, a strangely moving, early-Charlie Brownish head of a rural village-idiot gangly teenager, balanced on a preternaturally stretched long, thin neck, seeming to float like a helium balloon against the blue sky.

Makar is one among a number of Egyptian artists in the exhibition, which also includes Taher, and he vigorously supports more international exposure for Egyptian artists: “Yes, it’s an opportunity for them to be seen by an international audience,” he concedes, “but what’s really important is that the international audiences are getting an opportunity to become acquainted with the art of Egypt.”

And the venue? They’ve applied to move the exhibition to the Cairo Opera House. Stay tuned.  et

The First Group Exhibition by the International Artists Support Group is currently showing at the Al-Ahram Gallery, Al-Ahram Building, Galaa Street. Open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. At press time, curator Nabil Makar had put in a request to the Cairo Opera House to have it shown there after it ends at Al-Ahram.