Suleiman Mansour
Born in 1947 in Birzeit, Palestine, Mansour studied fine art at the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem.
Mansour has tailored his comprehensive portfolio around the Palestinian struggle as he was absorbed during the first years of his career with the Palestinian identity drawing inspiration from old cultures of the area, Palestinian folk culture and landscape in Palestine. His recent work is centered on the individual figure to convey the different states of exhausting anticipation or loss and pain, resulting from his experience of living under the occupation.
Mansour has contributed extensively to the development of an infrastructure for the fine arts in Palestine. He was the head of the League of Palestinian Artists from 1985 to 1990. Mansour and other artists established the ‘New Vision’ art movement in 1991 to boycott Israeli art supplies by using local materials. In 1994, Mansour co-founded Al-Wasiti Art Center in East Jerusalem and served as its Director from 1995 to 2003. He contributed in establishing the International Academy of Art Palestine in 2004. Mansour taught at numerous cultural institutions and universities in the West Bank. Also, a professional cartoonist, Mansour published from 1981 to 1993 in Al-Awda weekly and Al-Fajr English Weekly. He is a co-author of “Catalog of the art of Palestinian Embroidery” 1986 and “Palestinian folk costumes” 1985.
Mansour has received numerous awards in recognition of his achievements. Notably, Mansour received the Palestine Prize for the Visual Arts in 1998, the grand prize in the Cairo Biennial in 1998 and the UNESCO-Sharjah prize for Arab culture in 2019. Mansour’s work has been shown and collected by many museums, including The British Museum, UK, Arab Museum of Modern Arts, Qatar, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Barjeel Art Foundation, UAE, Jordanian museum and Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation, Jordan and Institut du Monde Arabe, France.
He has held solo exhibitions in Ramallah, Sharjah, Cairo, East Jerusalem, Gaza, Stockholm and Santiago de Chile. His group exhibitions include Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow, 1980, Jordan National Gallery, Amman, 1991, Institue du Monde Arabe, Paris 1996, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, 2003. He currently lives in Jerusalem and works in Ramallah.
