Press

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« The latest paintings by Hassan Musa are very dense, very rich, and terribly bitter. Each one combines a canvas by an old master with an episode from the lives of today's celebrities. [...] However, these clever juxtapositions are not just brilliantly painted masterpieces of satirical appropriation... »
Philippe Dagen, 2023

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« The image is nothing without the gaze. Each person brings something of themselves when looking at it. It's like the different versions of the same story. On the TV news, I see Pietàs, Ophelias. The associations happen involuntarily. »
Hassan Musa, 2018

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« Beyond the often subversive content of his work, technical exploration is also a challenge for Hassan Musa. Far from conventional paths, he invents his own pictorial vocabulary, composed of elements of Arabic calligraphy and repetitive fabric patterns, which he works in the style of the batiks from his childhood.»
Muriel Plantier, 2016

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« Hassan Musa is one of the most effective innovators in contemporary art. »
Philippe Dagen, 2015

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« I think that the artist can, in his or her way, attempt to repair the world. I like the idea of repairing, as well as its aesthetics. There is no new world or new art history to invent. My approach is to take the history of European art, the only one that I was able to study in school, and to rework it, to repair it in my way.»
Hassan Musa, 2014

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« Building bridges between the West, Africa, and the East, the Sudanese man turns the history of humanity into a precious treasure from which he draws without hesitation. A meeting with Hassan Musa, a free man who plays with icons.»
Nicolas Michel , 2012

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« Musa is one of the leading specialists in the art of image surgery today. He cuts, extracts, cultivates tissues, modifies them, then grafts and stitches them back together with a rare precision of eye and hand. »
Philippe Dagen, 2022

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« Sudanese artist Hassan Musa’s exhibition of 23 multimedia works, including painting, drawing, sewing fabrics, collage, wood cut and calligraphy, carries strong political messages on timely topics such as racism, poverty and migration.»
Karen Dabrowska, 2018

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« What Musa expresses through his works is precisely the deterritorialized, nomadic, and fluid nature of the world—a world without identities or borders, a mobile and fluid world traversing the constructions necessary for the colonization of the world. »
Jean-Philippe Cazier, 2015

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« Besides his work on fabric and ink on paper depictions of 20th Century icons in Arabic calligraphy, part of the exhibition features hand-decorated envelopes that he sent to his curator, some of them beautiful, some of them funny, but all of them eye-catching. »
Jenny Horrocks, 2014

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« Settled in a village in the Gard region, artist Hassan Musa enjoys playing with codes and techniques. Under his fingers, whether with a brush or behind his sewing machine, Che Guevara becomes Saint Sebastian, and Bin Laden an individual drowned in American civilization. The artist has appropriated Western history to reinterpret its figures.»
Anne Devailly, 2014

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« Through patches, stitching, writing, and painting, the artist opens our eyes to all images, whatever they may be, with the aim of returning them to the world. Their works, dazzling in both intellect and vibrant colors as well as decorative inventions, challenge the obviousness of what we see—or think we see. »
Renaud Faroux, 2011

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« Hassan Musa's works, combinations of painting and printed textiles, representations of contemporary objects, and references to classical art, subvert clichés and demystify the powerful. »
Marianne Meunier, 2020

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« Two verses from the Quran intertwine in the neon calligraphy work by the Sudanese-born artist Hassan Musa. They can be read from the top of the Arab World Institute, looking down four floors into the central courtyard. One of the phrases encourages dialogue, while the other calls for holy war.»
Eric Biétry-Rivierre, 2017

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« The artist, who took part in Africa Remix, the major exhibition of contemporary African art at the Centre Pompidou in 2005, seizes the icons of our time—"personalities who are no longer people"—as well as art history and its practices, in order to desacralize and challenge them. Always with distance, often with humor. »
Stephane Cerri, 2015

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« Alongside Chéri Samba, Rachid Koraïchi and Ousmane Sow, Hassan Musa is today among the most well-known contemporary artists in the Francophone world. »
Alisa Belanger, 2014

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« Hassan Musa operates at a symbolic crossroads and a confrontation between two cultures, two types of thinking: one hegemonic, the other always perceived in a peripheral and stereotyped manner. He reflects on the modes of communication and transmission of these reductive conceptions, which are fully integrated into the collective imagination.»
Julie Crenn, 2013

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« I wouldn’t say that I have two cultures—I have only one! It is complex because it is the same culture that everyone shares: the market culture, the culture of a consumer society that has built its references within the logic of the international capitalist market, with some elements of Mediterranean, Christian tradition, etc.—what we call the West. The usual cliché is to say that, on one side, I have an Arab-Muslim, Eastern, or African culture, and on the other, a Western culture.»
Lucie Touya & Thierry William Koudeji, 2008