Mohamed Abdella Otaybi (Sudanese b. 1948)
Otaybi is an influential figure in the Sudanese artistic movement. Otaybi graduated from the Khartoum College of Fine and Applied Arts, having begun working as an artist during a dynamic period of the 1970s. He was immersed in debates about cultural heritage and visual identity, which have stayed important topics for him and has fed the amalgamation of Africanism, Islam, Arabism and Sudanese themes of identity seen throughout his paintings. His painterly language has evolved over the years, using architectural structures, decorative motifs and calligraphic forms to echo the questions around cultural heritage he finds so important. A gentle activist, his work has a romantic hue of Sudanese life, nature, music and heritage and his use of colour and layering creates a dreamlike sensation on the mythological motifs he often refers to, adding depth and vibration to his paintings.
Otaybi has held many solo exhibitions in Khartoum, from 1970 to the present and has shown in international group exhibitions including the Sharjah Biennial, UAE, 1993; Modernism in Sudanese Art, British Museum, London, 2004; Sudan: Emergence of Singularities, P21 Gallery, London, 2017 and Khartoum Contemporary, Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, 2017. His work features in private and public collections including the National Museum in Sharjah, UAE. In December 2018 Otaybi was the focus of the article ‘Masters we Need to Master’ in Collector Magazine published by Art Africa.