Soly Cisse, who was born in 1969, lives and works in the city of Dakar and is one of Senegal’s most celebrated artists. He has exhibited widely in Europe, the Americas and within Africa.

After overcoming the fierce objections of his medical doctor father, he attended the prestigious Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts de Dakar, graduated top of his class and went on to show widely in Dakar in the 1990’s.

He has exhibited at the Dakar Biennale regularly since 2000 and was part of the highly acclaimed Africa Remix show in 2005.

Intuitive rather than conceptual Cisse’s paintings combines a sensuality of touch that is born out of the aesthetics of Dakar as manifest in its music and textiles and the vibrancy of its multi ethnic trading culture. The cost of modernity is a common theme– the natural world being overrun by man’s artificial constructs – the animals of his childhood hunting days now running from urbanisation rather than the hunter’s arrow. There is also a strong spiritual and symbolic almost riddle-like quality to his work, animals in their innocence, appearing as if in a dream, powerless, yet conveying an important meaning that the modern world, Cisse seems to say, is blind to.