Ousmane Sow

Ousmane Sow, born on October 10, 1935, in Dakar, and died on December 1, 2016, in the same city, was a Senegalese sculptor.

Ousmane Sow was born in Dakar to a mother from Saint-Louis and a father from Dakar, thirty years his senior. He grew up in Reubeuss, one of Dakar’s toughest neighborhoods, where he received an extremely strict upbringing during which his father instilled responsibility in him from a very young age. From his father, he inherited rigor, a sense of duty, and a free spirit. After his father’s death, and despite his deep affection for his mother, he decided to leave for Paris, penniless. While working various odd jobs, and after giving up his studies at the School of Fine Arts, he earned a degree in physiotherapy.

Why did Ousmane Sow sculpt? Out of basic necessity, his family would say. As a child, he began sculpting stones he collected along the beach in Dakar, and later, as a physiotherapist in his Parisian practice, he continued to mold the paste used as plaster for patients’ fractures. He animated and filmed these small figures to bring them to life. It was like a need to breathe; he had to mold. He became a physiotherapist to sculpt the human body and a sculptor to mold his famous material, which he calls “my product.” Although he had been sculpting since childhood, it was only at the age of fifty that he made sculpture his full-time profession. But the physiotherapy he practiced until then undoubtedly contributed to the magnificent sense of anatomy found in his work. Throughout these years, he transformed his medical office and successive apartments into sculpture studios at night, destroying or abandoning the works he created.

By focusing on the ethnic groups of Africa and then America, he works in series. The sculptures emerge from the earth, imposing themselves, figurative and powerful, to tell the story of life. Free men, always in action, whom he sculpts in perpetual struggle. Pastoralists, warriors, anonymous heroes, great men—so many figures who come to tell us their story and challenge us to imagine our own. Drawing on ethnology, history, photography, and film, Ousmane Sow presents a reconstruction of life.

But what do Ousmane Sow’s works evoke in us? What did passersby on the Pont des Arts in Paris feel in 1999, confronted by the features of the Nuba, the Maasai, the Fulani, or by “The Battle of Little Bighorn,” staged a few meters above the scene? These are gazes one does not forget, a message conveyed by the body. By exhibiting his works for the first time at the age of fifty, the Nuba series, emblematic of his work, Ousmane Sow was immediately revealed to the public. His dazzling oeuvre circulated throughout the world.

On December 11, 2013, Ousmane Sow became the first Black artist to be elected to the French Academy of Fine Arts. He died on December 1, 2016, in Dakar, his birthplace.