Born in 1977 in Senegal, Omar Ba lives and works in Dakar. His paintings, produced using a variety of techniques and materials, represent political and social motifs open to multiple interpretations. His artistic vocabulary raises historical and timeless questions while formulating a wholly contemporary artistic message. Omar Ba’s iconography features personal metaphors, ancestral references and hybrid figures. This combination of heterogeneous elements illustrates his desire to abolish boundaries and categories. His work, with its enigmatic nature and poetic intensity, rejects all forms of didactic narrative, seeking instead to express his subconscious and his symbolic interpretation of the real
SOLO SHOW - Political Animals
On November 20, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) will open the first U.S. museum exhibition of works by acclaimed Senegalese contemporary artist Omar Ba.
With Omar Ba: Political Animals, the BMA introduces audiences to the incredible conceptual, social, and political relevance of Ba’s oeuvre as well as to his distinct formal approach, which combines the fine detail associated with drawing and the scale and grandeur of history paintings.
Baltimore Museum of Art, United States
Through April 2, 2023
SOLO SHOW - Focus
Omar Ba’s work is characterized by its enigmatic nature and its great poetic intensity. In contrast with a didactic narrative, he rather seeks to express his subconscious and his symbolic interpretation of reality. The artist deals with themes such as chaos, destruction, and dictatorship, draping his political discourse in a veil of poetry through a pictorial language that is entirely his own, both fierce and delicate.
Omar Ba - Focus
Fine Arts Museum, Belgium
From April 1st to August 7, 2022
SAME DREAM – Solo show
Same Dream brings together several of Ba’s paintings depicting dictators and authority figures, who lead to corrupt and violent regimes across the African continent and in other parts of the world, particularly where the legacies of colonialism persist. At times represented as hybrid beasts—part human, part animal— these despotic warlords are typically enveloped in an abundance of lush flora and fauna. Indeed, nature becomes a recurring force across Ba’s oeuvre.
From September 17, 2020 to January 31, 2021
Contemporary Calgary, 701 11 Street SW, Calgary, Canada
GLOBAL(E) RESISTANCE – group show
The exhibition ‘Global(e) Restitance’ reveals for the first time, more than sixty artists reunited for the last century around the question of “resitance”, including Senegalese Omar Ba and South African artist Billie Zangewa.
The exhibition that collects many work from many different medium and countries, questions the theoretical and esthetical relationship between politics and art. The idea of resisting, studied through the handling of politic as well as art for activism, as always been experienced by artists under oppression and inequalities.
From July 29 to January 4, 2021
Centre Pompidou, Rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris
Omar Ba, Same Dream - Solo show
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is presenting the first Canadian monographic exhibition dedicated to Omar Ba, one of the most influential artists of his generation. Omar Ba : same Dream showcases a selection of Ba’s major works from different periods in his career. In addition, the artist is creating a large-scale mural for the Montreal public, directly on one of the gallery walls. Ba’s work is at once a bold critique of tyranny, a celebration of the strength of the human spirit and an ode to the resilience of the world’s youth.
MBAM, MONTREAL, CANADA
From 30/05/2019 to 10/11/2019
Same Dream - solo show
THE POWER PLANT, TORONTO, CANADA
From 26/01/2019 to 12/05/2019
