Omar Ba
Courtesy Omar Ba
Omar Ba is a contemporary Senegalese artist known for his mixed media paintings which fuse figurative and decorative motifs.
Born in 1977 in Senegal, Omar Ba lives and works in Dakar. His paintings, produced using a variety of techniques and materials, represent political and social motifs open to multiple interpretations. His artistic vocabulary raises historical and timeless questions while formulating a wholly contemporary artistic message. Omar Ba’s iconography features personal metaphors, ancestral references and hybrid figures. This combination of heterogeneous elements illustrates his desire to abolish boundaries and categories. His work, with its enigmatic nature and poetic intensity, rejects all forms of didactic narrative, seeking instead to express his subconscious and his symbolic interpretation of the real
Ba’s surreal scenes of violence and fantasy investigate despotic warlords of the present, traditional folklore, colonial oppression, and the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. The artist has said that his work is meant to tell narratives that connect the histories of Europe and Africa through their meaning. Ba studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar before attending the École Supéreiure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. The artist has participated in exhibitions in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Today, Ba’s works are held in the collections of the Centre National Des Arts Plastiques in Paris and the Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporaine de la Ville de Geneva.
