Sliman Mansour
سليمان منصور
Painter
Palestinian painter whose images of porters, peasants, and olive trees made him a founding figure of contemporary Palestinian art.
Sliman Mansour was born in 1947 in Birzeit and studied fine art at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. A founding member of the League of Palestinian Artists and of the al-Wasiti Art Center in Jerusalem, he has spent five decades building the institutions of Palestinian visual art as well as his own body of work. His paintings return to a handful of enduring subjects — the land, the olive tree, the peasant, Jerusalem carried on an old man’s back.
His 1973 painting Jamal al-Mahamel (Camel of Hardship), showing a porter bowed beneath the weight of the Old City, became one of the most reproduced images in Palestinian art. During the first intifada, Mansour and fellow artists of the “New Visions” group boycotted Israeli art supplies and turned instead to local materials — mud, henna, natural dyes — making the boycott itself part of the work. He lives and works in Jerusalem, and his paintings are held in collections including Mathaf in Doha and the Barjeel Art Foundation.
Selected works
- Jamal al-Mahamel (Camel of Hardship) (1973)
- “New Visions” material experiments during the first intifada
- Recent series on exhaustion, anticipation, and loss
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.