Artist: Aliou Diack

Aliou Diack (b. 1987, Mbour, Senegal) develops a practice rooted in an intimate dialogue between nature, spirituality, and collective memory. Trained at the National School of Arts in Dakar, Diack’s compositions charged with visual intensity, inhabited by animal presences, mineral tones, and textured surfaces, evoke a primordial and instinctive universe.

Central to Diack’s practice is the use of natural pigments derived from plants and trees, many traditionally employed for medicinal or ritual purposes. Sourced from his native region in Senegal, these materials carry with them ancestral knowledge transmitted across generations. Prepared within his family, they embody a living heritage that the artist reactivates on canvas.

His paintings trace a spiritual journey informed by Sufi traditions. The act of painting becomes ritualistic, repetitive, meditative, cyclical. He approaches the canvas as a field to be sown, layering pigments as a farmer would cultivate land, allowing texture to prevail over figuration and rooting each work in a tactile, almost earthly presence.

At the intersection of personal history and broader geopolitical realities, Diack’s practice engages questions of contemporary becoming of Senegal, of Africa, and of a globalised world.

Positioning himself as an intermediary between humanity and the spirit of nature, Aliou Diack’s practice unfolds rhizomatically, deeply rooted yet expansively connected. His return to origins generates narratives that are intimate and universal, affirming art as a site where ancestral knowledge, spiritual consciousness, and contemporary urgency converge.

Woman is the most extraordinary thing that God has created. First, she is His own laboratory, His own workshop in which He Himself works. He sends neither angel nor spirit there. It is in the woman’s womb that a drop of water is transformed into a human being. — Amadou Hampâté Bâ

Echoing the thoughts of Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Malian writer, historian and ethnologist, Aliou Diack explores the figure of the woman emerging as a site of sacred creation. Described as God’s own “laboratory,” she embodies a space where life takes form through a direct and unmediated divine act.

In this vision, the womb becomes more than a biological locus but it is a spiritual terrain, a generative matrix where matter transforms into being. Woman is thus not only a creation, but a vessel of creation itself, carrying within her the mystery and continuity of life.

Diack’s canvases are haunted by animal presences that emerge and dissolve, half-formed, as if appearing from memory or dream. These figures float within layers of natural pigments drawn from plants and trees in his native Senegal, materials imbued with ancestral knowledge and ritual significance. His process; ritualistic, repetitive and meditative echoes the act of cultivation: sowing, tending, and allowing forms to emerge organically.

Into the Foetus is a meditation on creation and spirituality as inseparable. To create is to touch the source of life itself; to explore the origins of being is to move toward the divine. In these works, Diack traces a space where body, spirit, and world converge, where creation is at once intimate, ancestral, and universal. In this light, the figure of the woman, the act of creation, and the gesture of painting align within a shared cosmology. One that honors origin, transmission, and the continuous unfolding of life.