Abushariaa

Untitled

The Door

The Birth of the Light

I first met Abushariaa in Khartoum in 1993. He was working from a tiny room, most of which was filled with a desk. Abushariaa worked on one side; his friend worked on the other. On the floor beside him was a waist-high stack of papers, and he was adding to the stack at the rate of four or five paintings a day.

Khartoum under the authoritarian Bashir regime was not the most receptive environment for artists, and Abushariaa, with a number of other young artists, fled to Nairobi in 1995. He has since become rather well known, and has exhibited throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. I love the whimsy in his work, and the blend of happenstance and precision. You can see more of his work here and here.