Brevity is the Soul of Wit: Amir Nour Between Minimalism and Africanism

Over the span of more than fifty years, the Sudanese-American and Chicago-based artist, Amir Nour, has created sculptures that reflect his remarkable ability to integrate methods, techniques, forms, and ideas that draw from his diverse experiences as a diasporic person.¹ Nour was born in Shendi, an ancient city on the bank of the Nile River, which was a center of trade activities that connected various parts of the country and beyond. He came of age at a time when Shendi's markets were bustling with artisans who were "carving boats and water-wheels, making wooden furniture, making bricks, weaving beautiful cotton cloth and building adobe houses."² Yet, as Nour has also asserted, "there was no tradition of [figural] sculpture, nor were there any statues around except from the ruins of ancient Meroe and Kush scattered far around the town."³

Amir Nour, Balance, 2016. Fiberglass and wood, 436 x 244 x 231 cm. Installation view of Amir Nour: Brevity Is the Soul of Wit exhibition, Bait Al Serkal, Arts Area, Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates. Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation. © Amir Nour.

Image courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

Amir Nour. Self-portrait at the Slade School of Fine Art, 1962. © Amir Nour.

Courtesy the artist

In the mid-1950s, when Nour enrolled as a student at the College of Fine and Applied Arts in Khartoum, there were no curricula in sculpture or three-dimensional work. As the artist himself emphasized, instruction in sculpture making as we know it today did not exist in the school until around 1955, when the college recruited a British expatriate, who developed and taught rudimentary courses in sculpture that primarily focused on simple methods of modeling, making of molds in plaster, and techniques of wood carving.⁴

These early realities beg the question of how Nour has evolved to become one of the most talented and innovative sculptors of his generation, not only in the African and the Arab worlds, but also the United States, where he has lived and worked since 1969.⁵ Nour attributes his early interest in sculpture to his encounter with the work of the late Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar (Mokhtar) (1891–1934) in 1950s Cairo, who proved to be inspirational. It was the first time Nour had seen a large body of work by a modern Arab artist close to his home. He described the encounter as a thrilling experience, realizing later "how Mukhtar's life somewhat corresponded to mine in the fact that he lived most of his life outside [his home country of] Egypt."⁶

Two other experiences proved to be transformative for Nour's creative endeavor. The first was his exposure to the diversity of Sudanese visual culture through annual trips to various parts of the country organized by the College of Fine and Applied Arts as part of its rigorous curricula to encourage immersion in local art and crafts and the variety of landscapes with which the country is endowed. The second experience was the result of his training at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art in London from the late 1950s to mid-1960s. Studying abroad not only exposed Nour to the Western modernist tradition of figurative sculpture, but it also enabled him to "acquire a visual vocabulary based on a proper understanding of the elements of design, and the principles of organizing shapes and forms into coherent compositions."⁷ Most important for him as an aspiring sculptor was the study of the human figure and its representation in three-dimensional format.

Expanded Gourd, 1991. Bronze, 18 x 25 x 43cm. © Amir Nour.

Courtesy the artist

Nour's evolution as an artist was further en riched by his exposure to the work of many non-Western artists and art students he met in the United Kingdom.⁸ Indicative of the cosmopolitan nature of the colonial metropole, London's...