Sliman Mansour, one of the leading figures in contemporary Palestinian art, has died aged 79.
The announcement was made by Mansour’s family on his verified Instagram account shortly after a post saying he was in critical condition. No cause of death has been disclosed.
“The final chapter has been written,” the family said. “With hearts heavy beyond words, we share that our beloved father has passed away.
“To the world, he leaves behind a life filled with beauty, memory, and a legacy that will continue to live through all those he touched. But to us, we lost a father, our source of love, strength and home.”
Funeral and memorial details will be announced later.
Born in Birzeit, near Ramallah, in 1947, Mansour was at the forefront of Palestinian art for more than five decades. His work helped to shape a visual language for Palestinian identity, drawing repeatedly on the land and the experiences of displacement and occupation.
Mansour graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1970. He found his subjects in the landscape and daily life around him. Olive trees and traditional embroidery recur throughout his paintings, while Jerusalem appears as both a place and an object of longing.
He was perhaps best known for Jamal Al Mahamel, also called Camel of Hardship. The painting depicts an elderly Palestinian porter carrying the city of Jerusalem on his back, and has become one of the most widely recognised images in Palestinian art.
The weary but determined figure came to embody the Palestinian concept of sumud, or steadfastness. Reproduced as a poster, the image moved beyond galleries and became a fixture in Palestinian homes and public spaces.
In an account he gave to The National in 2021, Mansour recalled that an exhibition featuring work by him, Nabil Anani and Issam Badr at 79 Gallery in Ramallah was closed by the Israeli army after three hours in 1980. Two weeks later, the artists were summoned and warned against producing political paintings.
“They told us that painting the Palestinian flag was forbidden, but also the colours were forbidden,” Mansour said. “So Issam said, ‘What if I were to make a flower of red, green, black and white?’, to which the officer replied angrily, ‘It will be confiscated. Even if you paint a watermelon, it will be confiscated.’ So the watermelon was mentioned, but by the Israeli officer.”
Mansour was a founder of the League of Palestinian Artists and its leader from 1986 to 1990. During the First Intifada, he co-founded the New Visions collective with Vera Tamari, Tayseer Barakat and Anani. The artists boycotted Israeli art supplies and turned to materials found locally, including mud and henna.
Mud became central to Mansour’s work. He layered and moulded it on wooden structures, allowing the material to crack as it dried. The resulting figures carried a sense of fragility and time passing, while the earth itself tied the work physically to Palestine.
Mansour also spent much of his career building an infrastructure for Palestinian art. In 1994, he co-founded Al-Wasiti Art Centre in East Jerusalem, established to preserve Palestinian art and connect artists living in Palestine with those in exile. He later joined the founding board of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah.
He taught at Al Quds University from 2000 to 2014 and contributed cartoons and illustrations to the English-language Palestinian newspaper Al Fajr and Al-Awda magazine between 1981 and 1993.
His work had longstanding connections to the UAE. Mansour took part in the Sharjah Biennial in 1995 and held a solo exhibition, The Fabric of Memory, at Sharjah Art Museum in 2003. He received the 2019 Unesco-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in recognition of his art, teaching and work creating platforms for younger artists.
Mansour also received the Palestine Prize for the Visual Arts and the Grand Nile Prize at the Cairo Biennial in 1998, the latter for his mud relief series I Am Ismail.
By late 2023, the war in Gaza was changing the way he worked. Mansour had begun a large painting without preparatory sketches, applying colour and brushstrokes directly to the canvas.
“All the images that come to my mind are really horrible,” he said. “Some I can’t get out of my mind – I can only get them out through painting. You know, I always hated abstract expressionism. I didn’t like it. But I think now is the time for it.”
In the same 2023 interview with The National, Mansour said a stroke two years earlier had affected his left hand and made it harder for him to concentrate and paint. He nevertheless continued to visit his Ramallah studio.
“I try to work daily, to go to the studio, to do something there – not painting all the time, but maybe reading or making sketches or something like that,” he said. “I try to go every day. It’s a routine and I don’t like to stop it.”
