Galerie Claude Lemand

Mohammad Omar Khalil.
In these paint­ings, I con­cen­trated on the happy times in Mustafa Said’s life and not his sad ordeal. I was not trying to illus­trate or trans­late the story, but rather treat it as a work of art - free and spon­ta­neous, evolving through dif­ferent stages. There isn’t one way of working and cre­ating and every artist has his or her own way to create. Every step that you take adds to your knowl­edge, solid­i­fies your base and enriches your vocab­u­lary. In my own art, I am inter­ested in lim­i­ta­tions and not expan­sions - learning when an art work is fin­ished and not over­worked by expanding beyond the limits of neces­sity.”

These large water­colours were inspired by the book Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, one of the most beau­tiful books written in Arabic. It’s daring and honest dealing with sexual mat­ters and frank depic­tion of life in Sudanese vil­lage were ground-breaking at the time it was pub­lished. The con­tro­versy it stirred in the Sudan was sim­ilar to the recep­tions that Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn received in the United States. It por­trayed things that are known to every­body, but gen­er­ally never dealt with in books.”
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Works in Museums and Public Collections:

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 Mathaf, Museum of Arab Modern Arts, Doha, Qatar.
Museum, Institut du monde arabe, Paris + Donation Claude & France Lemand in 2018.
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