Birth name Osman Waqialla Name Osman Waqialla Origin Rufa'a, Sudan Role Musical Artist | Occupation(s) calligrapher Died January 4, 2007, Sudan | |
Years active 1940s -2000s (decade) | ||
Osman Waqialla (1925−4 January 2007), Arabic: عثمان وقيع الله, Sudanese artist, calligrapher.
Early life and career
Waqialla was born in Rufa'a, in Central Sudan, Al Jazirah state on the banks of the Blue Nile. He graduated from the School of Design, Gordon Memorial College, Khartoum, Sudan (1945). In 1946 received a scholarship and moved to England to join Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London and finished his studied in 1949. Later he moved to Egypt, where he trained as a calligrapher under the master Sayyid Muhammed Ibrahim (died 1994) at the School of Arabic Calligraphy in Cairo.
During his time at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts, London, and the School of Calligraphy, Cairo, Waqialla explored the expressive and compositional possibilities of Arab calligraphic form in his text-based paintings. Waqialla thus became of the first North African artist to free Arab calligraphy from its historical relationship with the sacred Islamic text and to propose it as a veritable resource for modernist art.
After schooling he moved back to Sudan, where he taught at the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum at the beginning of the 1950s. In the early 1960s Waqialla’s students and colleagues at the College of Fine and Applied Arts, Khartoum, Ahmed Mohammed Shibrain (b 1931), Ibrahim el-Salahi and Tag el-Sir Ahmed (b 1933) joined in the task of creating a Sudanese modernist art From 1954 to 1964 he founded Studio Osman as a meeting place for artists and intellectuals in Sudan. At that time he received several commissions, including calligraphic designs for the first Sudanese currency, and he is considered one of the first artists in modern art movement in Sudan to explore calligraphy.
In 1967 he moved to England and worked as a consultant calligrapher to the firm of banknote makers De La Rue. His work has been exhibited in Africa, the Middle East, the United States and Europe, including the touring exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, which began at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995. He Also exhibited in a landmark Group exhibition that year at the Barbican Art Centre, The Curve gallery, Signs, Traces and Calligraphy, curated by Rose Issa.
In 2005 he returned to Sudan. He is survived by his third wife Zahra, a Chinese calligrapher, who lives in London, and by two daughters and a son by his first marriage. He died of malaria on Thursday, 4 January 2007, aged 81.