Sliman Mansour

Sliman Mansour was born in Birzeit, Palestine, in 1947, and came of age moving between Birzeit, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem — a geography of multiple attachments that would prove formative for his art. He studied fine art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, graduating in 1970, and went on to become one of the most significant Palestinian painters of his generation, building a body of work in which land, memory, displacement, and collective identity are inseparable concerns.

His 1973 painting Camel of Hardship — also known as Jamal al-Mahamel — stands as his most widely recognized work. The image of an elderly Palestinian figure bearing Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock on his back transforms the act of carrying into a meditation on historical displacement and enduring attachment to place. The work established the symbolic vocabulary Mansour would develop across decades: figures rooted in Palestinian cultural life, the olive harvest as an emblem of continuity and labor, and the rituals of mourning and resistance that mark a people living under occupation. Rituals under Occupation (1989), depicting a funeral procession with a coffin draped in the Palestinian flag, belongs to the charged visual language of the First Intifada period, as does The Village Awakens (1987). Prints such as Salma (1980), Memory of Places (2009), Land Day (2020), and Olive Picking (2021) trace the persistence of these themes across his career, from early figurative work through a sustained printmaking practice in his later years.

Mansour's exhibition history spans more than four decades. A solo presentation at Gallery 79 in Ramallah in 1981 was followed by The Fabric of Memory at the Sharjah Museum in 2003, Sketches at Al-Mamal Gallery in Jerusalem in 2007, and Terrains of Belonging at al-Hoash Gallery in Jerusalem in 2011. More recently, Sliman Mansour: Limited Edition opened at Zawyeh Gallery in Ramallah in 2023, the same year his work appeared in the group exhibition Traces of Utopia at the AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery in Beirut. His paintings and prints are held in the permanent collections of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman — a breadth of institutional presence that reflects the reach and durability of his contribution to modern Arab art.