Mohamed Abdalla Otaybi, (born Sudan 1948)

The Community

The Community
acrylic on canvas
2018
80 x 80cm (31 1/2 x 31 1/2in).

Mohamed Abdalla Otaybi was born in 1948 in El-Douiem, White Nile State. He attended school at Khortaqqat School close to El-Obeid and later attended the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum.

Otaybi worked as a designer at the Design and Exhibition Department of the Ministry of Youth and Sport until in 1982, he left the ministry and moved to the Sultanate of Oman, where he worked in a number of different fields including advertising, education and as a cartoonist. Otaybi returned to the Sudan in 1984. His activities since then have included teaching design at the College of Music and Drama at the Sudan University for Science and Technology and running an art shop in Omdurman.

In his early years, Otaybi was heavily inspired by Ibrahim El-Salahi and Ahmed Shibrain. Otaybi shared the underlying philosophy of the School of Khartoum movement's first generation in that he wanted to look within Sudanese culture to create an art that was meaningful both to himself and to Sudanese society. However, Otaybi thinks of himself as rather belonging to the School of Khartoum's second generation as his work in the 1970s markedly differed from his predecessors.

In the late-1980s, Otaybi co-founded the Madrasat Al-Wahid (Eng: The School of the One) art movement with a number of other Sudanese artists. Otaybi explains this as the final stage of the School of Khartoum: members of the movement were seeking to create a concrete theoretical foundation to accompany the practices of the School of Khartoum. Al-Wahid concentrated on the Islamic aspects of the Khartoum School, as its founders felt that the Sufi Islamic tradition was widely spread in Sudanese culture, and they wanted to focus on that part of the Sudanese heritage which they saw as closest to the everyday life of the Sudanese.

For the past few years, Otaybi has moved on from the theories of the School of Khartoum and Madrasat Al-Wahid. In particular, he has turned towards a view of art that is more global. This does not mean that he has abandoned the use of the aesthetic heritage of the Sudan as a starting point for his work. Rather, he is seeking to create art that demonstrates local culture but that can also communicate with the rest of the world.

Otaybi has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has received a number of prestigious awards, including the 1981 Kuwaiti Golden Sail Award, a prize at the 1993 Sharjah Biennial and the Gold Medal at the 2003 Cairo Biennale.