MOR FAYE (1947-1984)

Mor Faye: The Untitled Series Works on Paper, 1969-84 It’s been over twenty-five years since the 1991 landmark posthumous retrospective exhibition of Mor Faye’s work at Galerie 39 in Dakar, Senegal, and subsequent participation  in  “Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennial” exhibition organized by the Museum for African Art, New York in 1993  that helped introduce his work to wider audiences around the world – this was a period  when almost no one was familiar with his work or knew that Africa even had something called contemporary culture for that matter. Much has changed since then, and this exhibition allows us to re-engage with the works of Mor Faye, albeit, with fresh eyes,  in the context of new realities surrounding the growing awareness of contemporary African art as well as the realization that  histories of Modernism are constantly changing as its global breadth and local particularities are revealed.   Also, Dakar, the artist’s city of birth, con

VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA SOLITUDE. Mor Faye n'est pas seulement aujourd'hui un peintre disparu. Son nom et son oeuvre sont ignorés de la plupart de ses contemporains. Et pourtant ce peintre obscur sénégalais est incontestablement l'un des précurseurs de l'art moderne africain. Son oeuvre s'est forgé une voie parallèle à celle de "l'Ecole de Dakar". Manifestement ses digressions poétiques, les formes ovales qui frôlent le cadre, les hachures, la spontanéité, la fougue et le vif de la couleur, les lignes nerveuses contenues dans son art dérangeaient les censeurs et commissaires. Sa façon de sentir et de comprendre le monde et les choses montre une correspondance particulière avec la réalité qui a caractérisé la vie d'une partie de l'oeuvre de Van Gogh. Mor a développé avec la peinture une relation dans "l'abstraction-conséquence", le rapport intime qui s'est noué entre lui et la réalité est devenu plus important que tout, q

Mor Faye the African Sphinx, the Eternal Artist Painter By Pr Samba Diop Mor Faye, a late Senegalese artist, and painter who died in Dakar in 1984 is being remembered and celebrated thanks to the current exhibition at the SKOTO Gallery in New York City (January 2017) organized by the well-known Art collector Me Bara Diokhane.  Even though a very talented artist, Faye was—and still is—not well known in his own country of Senegal. To summarize his biography, Faye was born in Dakar in 1947 and died at an early age in the same city in 1984. He attended the famous National School of Arts of Dakar founded by President Leopold Senghor and under the direction of another equally well-known Senegalese artist, namely Iba Ndiaye. Mor Faye also taught painting in high schools. Thus, Faye was at once a painter and an educator. Thus, it is fair to say that Faye is among the first cohort of Senegalese painters and sculptors attending some sort of formal institution in order to st

Mor Faye's Journey to the End of Negritude For many, the name of “Mor Faye” evokes immediately the figure of the artiste maudit (the cursed artist). Sure, when he died from cerebral malaria in 1984, he was only 37, the age when many martyrs, saints, revolutionaries are enshrined in eternal youth. Sure, he had spent most of the last five years of his life after 1979 in psychiatric hospitals, badly in need of care for mental illness. And sure, after the highly praised role his work has played in the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts and after his solo show at the Galerie 39 in Dakar in 1976, he had stopped participating in exhibitions and had withdrawn from the art world in Dakar under the patronage of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet-President of Senegal: when he was not incapacitated by psychiatric crises, Mor Faye devoted his daytime to teaching art in a high school in Dakar and reserved his nights to his own artistic creation. All that being said, to consider

MOR FAYE (1947-1984) It’s history in the making! No art gallery in the US United States has ever hosted a posthumous solo exhibit of a Senegalese painter. Mor Faye will change that, It is true that Mor Faye’s work had been spotted once in New York City,  in the last century, when the Museum For African art exhibited the five West African artists whose works had been just shown at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. Ten of Mor Faye’s works on paper were part of that collective exhibit ‘Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale”. In her introduction to the catalog that accompanied the Fusion exhibit, Susan Vogel referred to Mor Faye as "arguably one of Africa's finest artists working in an international contemporary style”…"A superb colorist who relished the sensuous fluidity of paint, Mor Faye absorbed the vocabulary of a dozen modern European masters, and created work alternately idyllic, nightmarish, and whimsical, but always his own.” That New Y