Ousmane SOW (1935-2016)

Ousmane Sow, born in 1935 in Dakar and died in 2016, is a Senegalese sculptor.

Attached to represent the human being, he worked by series and was interested in the ethnicities of Africa, and later America. Drawing inspiration from photography as well as cinema, history or ethnology, his art found an epic blow that was thought to be lost.

Fondamentaly figuratives, testifying however a concern for the truth removed from all realism, his effigies bigger than nature are carved without a model. These figures have the strenght of successful interbreeding between the art of the great occidental statuary and African ritual practices.

With the emergence of his Nouba in the mid-80s, Ousmane Sow places the soul in the body of the sculpture, and Africa in the heart of Europe. Moving from one continent to another, he pays tribute, in his creation of the battle of Little Big Horn, to the ultimate warriors of the same sun. From the tribes of Africa to the American Indians, he seeks the fluid of these standing men. As if it were for him to offer a mirror to these nomadic, proud and aesthetic ethnicities, this sedentary art that is missing: the sculpture.