Description
Olive Tree Painting, Olive Tree Art Print, Olive Tree Print, Olive Tree Canvas Prints
In his Olive Tree Painting (olive Tree Art Print) Sliman Mansour draws inspiration from the subject of the olive trees, and has focused on the theme of ‘land’ since 1970. His recent work is centred on the individual figure to convey the ‘different states of exhausting anticipation or loss,’ resulting from his experience of living under the occupation.
Sliman Mansour’s works are a repository of images of the Palestinian experience, but particularly of the landscape as reimagined and revisualised through his intimate knowledge of its stories, history and the contemporary devastations visited upon it. His timeless images evoke the specific geography of this place while telling us about the occupation that has redesigned its borders and contours. In vibrant colours and with bold, emphatic drawing, the artist renders a vivid experience in paint of the specific Palestinian geography with its iconic and ancient olive trees, the traditional stone houses of the villages built into the terraced hillsides, and some of the more modern manifestations of ‘home’: the refugee camps now similarly embedded in the Palestinian topography. Sliman Mansour‘s works also portray the people whose lives are intimately connected to the land, to its subtle modulations of light and shadow, the daily sunrises and sunsets and the seasonal rhythms. The men, women and children who have lived and worked on this land have strived to preserve its cultural heritage and protect it from theft and appropriation. Symbolic, yet crucial, images—the olive groves and their harvest, the nurturing maternal figure in traditional dress, the refugee with only the simple garment she stands up in, images in photographs of those who have gone before who gave their lives for freedom—fill these paintings by the artist who have made such an important contribution to Palestine’s visualisation of itself. Sliman Mansour is a seminal figure in the history of art in Palestine. Member of the New Visions group of artists formed in the First Intifada, he used non-traditional art materials such as earth and mud in multimedia and assemblage works as a means of boycotting traditional paint and canvas that came from Israeli suppliers and protesting against the violence of the occupation.
Born in 1947, Birzeit, Palestine, Sliman Mansour studied fine art at the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem. He has held solo exhibitions in Ramallah, New York, Sharjah, Cairo, Gaza and Stavanger, Norway. His group exhibitions include Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow (1980), Palestinian Spring, Al-Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem, 1985; New Visions, Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman, 1991; Made in Palestine, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas, 2003; and Contemporary Graphic Art in the Arab World, Nabad Gallery, Amman,2010. In 1998 he received the Palestine Prize for the Visual Arts at the Cairo Biennial.
Olive Tree Painting, Olive Tree Art Print, Olive Tree Print, Olive Tree Canvas Prints
