Mohamed Abdella Otaybi graduated from the Khartoum College of Fine and Applied Arts and began working as an artist during the dynamic period of the 1970s, where his practice was immersed in debates about cultural heritage and visual identity. Otaybi’s painterly language has evolved over the years, using architectural structures, decorative motifs and calligraphic forms to echo the questions of cultural visual expression he finds so important. A gentle activist and a powerful colourist, Otaybi’s work captures a romantic hue of Sudanese life. His sensitive layering of colour brings a dreamlike quality to the mythological motifs he often refers to, and adds depth and vibration to his paintings.
Otaybi has long been recognised as an influential figure in contemporary Sudanese painting. As well as exhibiting regularly in Khartoum since 1970, he has shown in international group exhibitions including: The Forest and Desert School Revisited, Circle Art Gallery, 2022; East African Masters, Cromwell Place, London, 2022; Khartoum Contemporary, Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, 2017; Sudan: Emergence of Singularities, P21 Gallery, London, 2017; Modernism in Sudanese Art, British Museum, London, 2004; and the Sharjah Biennial, UAE, 1993. In 2022 his solo exhibition Mohamed Otaybi: The Lost Paradise was held at Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi. Otaybi’s work features in private and public collections including the National Museum in Sharjah, UAE. In 2018 he was the focus of the article ‘Masters we Need to Master’ in Collector Magazine published by Art Africa.
