Rashid Diab

Rashid Diab is an accomplished Sudanese painter and master printmaker and art critic who has lived in Madrid, Spain, since 1982. He is one the most successful younger Sudanese artists living abroad, and a prolific artist who has participated in more than twenty solo and group exhibitions. His works are included in the permanent collections of several museums in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. In Madrid he owns and directs the Medani Galeri. a studio and which has become a well known print shop and a meeting place of talented artists. He was born in 1957 in Wad Medani, Gezira Province, Sudan. He studied at the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Khartoum and graduated with honors in 1978. He traveled to Madrid on a scholarship from the government of Spain, where he completed several graduate degrees: an M.F.A. in painting and M.F.A. in etching, and earned a Ph.D. in Fine Art for his thesis on the Sudanese contemporary art movement at the Complutense University in Madrid.

Diab's work reflects a synthesis of his Sudanese heritage and an awareness of contemporary artistic developments in Europe. His imagery and symbols range from Arabic illuminations and calligraphic designs, animals, human figures, traditional folk and historical motifs, to mythical and mask-like African motifs. This is illustrated not only in his etchings and paintings, but also in his rarely exhibited but successful experiments in other artistic media such as furniture and interior design. Diab's distinct use of calligraphy and calligraphic designs can be seen in several of his works where the written word becomes part of the overall design and the Arabic letter forms acquire an independent aesthetic value. Diab's experience in Spain has certainly enriched his art work. He has moved to new mediums, studied and mastered techniques such as silk screening, etching, and engraving.

During his early days in Spain, Diab was busy painting faces of people he left in Sudan and aspects of Sudanese social customs, occasions and rituals he missed in his new and estranged environment. Fragments of My Palace, 1984, and La Trayectoria, 1987, are typical works which represent the essence of Diab's early concerns in terms of subject matter and style. Diab uses calligraphic designs, motifs and in some cases verses from the Qur'an in addition to traditional and folk motifs. As in La Trayectoria, a repeated part of a short Qur'anic verse ran through the upper frame of the work. The calligraphy here, is rendered in a distinct style popular among Muslim clerics and students of traditional Qur'anic schools in Sudan and differs from the style known in other parts of the Islamic World. Diab's use of Arabic calligraphic designs is reminiscence of the Khartoum School style known in the works of Ibrahim al-Salahi, Ahmad Shibrain and Osman Waqiallah. The color scheme in Diab's work of this period also echoes the "earthy" style popularized by Ibrahim al-Salahi's earliest work, and emulated by other Khartoum artists in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In his latest works, Diab was inspired by painting techniques of art works from the Renaissance period he saw in Spanish and other European museums, and was particularly drawn by the Renaissance artists' ability to control color, light and contrast and their distribution over the canvas' space. However, Diab's works remain autobiographical and represent a continuity of subject matter. The constant unfolding thread of memory of the artist's past, his people and his native country's landscape, observed in earlier works, still persist in his most recent work. His series entitled Memories of an Immigrant Bird, 1989, in composition and use of space, and even in perspective, was a poetic expression of the artist's day dreams and memories of bygone times.

Diab's bold experimentation with color can be seen in a group of works entitled The Series of The Red Space, 1991 executed in oil on canvas, or in People, 1992-1994, a more recent series of monoprints. The forms or lines within the composition of the work, though conceived as abstract representations of people or genre scene, dissolved into overlapping and sometimes bold layers of color. Diab's painterly talent, improvisational spirit, and great sense of color, enabled him to achieve powerful and emotionally charged images in his works. Moving from one medium to another another, Diab remains faithful to his vision as a colorist and a painter. The forms in Diab's work acquire prominence as color formations rather than referential meanings or symbolic gestures. The overall composition and color relationships within Diab's work takes precedence over small composite details, motifs or other elements of design. Diab's work, whether it is an etching or a painting, exhibit a mastery of medium combined with a precision of statement and a magical vision which give the overall work a distinctive style.

Bibliographies/Artists:

Diab, Rashid. Traditional and Contemporiently in Sudanese Art (in Spanish). (Ph.D. Thesis in Fine Art). Madrid, Spain: Complutense University, 1991. (Published as a book by Complutense University Press, 1993).

Diab, Rashid, "Sudan", Contemporary Art from the Islamic World . Edited by Wijdan Ali. Amman, Jordan: The Royal Society of Fine Art, 1989. pp. 245 252.

"Dialogue with Rashid Diab and Hussien Sharief: Two Sudanese Artists (in Arabic)" Huruf (letters), (Khartoum University Press), Issue No. 1, September, 1990, pp. 91-95.

Hassan, Salah, The Art of Rashd Diab: A Retrospective 1983-1993. Boston: The National Museum of Afro-American Artists and Cornell University, 1994.

Hassan, Salah and Acha Debela, "Khartoum Connections: The Making of the Modern Sudanese Art Movement," in Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa. (London and New York: Whitechapel and Flammarion, 1995

Ndavu, Eva, "Graceful Blend of European African Art," Daily Nation (Nairobi, Kenya), Tuesday, October 24,1989.

"Profile: Rashid Diab. Outside the Fold" Sudanow, September, 1982. pp. 33-34.

"Rashid Diab: A Sudanese Artist (in Arabic )" Sawt Al-Kuwait International, 1990.

"Rashid Diab's Art Exhibition in Madrid: Review (in Arabic)", Al-Hayat, Monday July 31, 1989 Issue No. 9732