Amir Nour Sudanese/American, 1936-2021

Amir Nour (1936–2021, Shendi, Sudan) was a Sudanese-American sculptor whose work forms a bridge between Western minimalism and Arab and African art. Influenced by African sculpture, adobe architecture, Sudanese landscapes of deserts and plains, cattle horns and calabashes, he developed a sculptural language based on arches, geometric and hemispheric shapes, working in bronze, stainless steel, moulded plastic, cement and fibreglass.

From the late 1960s, Nour created a new visual language combining African-derived forms with a minimalist aesthetic. Although his early sculptures were produced contemporaneously with those of major Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, he maintained that his work remained distinct: “I grew up in an entirely divergent environment, culture and religion… Yet my work and Western minimalism share the simplicity and purity of forms. My minimalism is rooted in my experience and vision of my culture and history.”

Amir Nour received diplomas from the Slade School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, and later a BFA and MFA from Yale University. This education introduced him to the vocabulary of Western modernism while also bringing him into contact with artists and students engaged in discussions around decolonisation. From 1969 he was based in Chicago, where he later taught at the City Colleges. During this period he encountered the Civil Rights movement and developed friendships with members of AfriCOBRA and other Chicago-based collectives, as well as Black sculptors such as Richard Hunt and Melvin Edwards.

His work has been shown in some of the most significant museum exhibitions of the past decades, including The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (2001–2002), curated by Okwui Enwezor, shown at MoMA PS1, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and Other Primary Structures (2014), curated by Jens Hoffmann and Joanna Montoya at the Jewish Museum, New York, a sequel to the seminal 1966 exhibition Primary Structures. Other key exhibitions include African Art Today: Four Major Artists (1974), African-American Institute, New York; Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (1995), Whitechapel Gallery, London; Mohamed Omer Khalil Etchings / Amir I.M. Nour Sculpture (1994), Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; and Amir Nour: Brevity is the Soul of Wit: A Retrospective, 1956–Present (2016–2017), Sharjah Art Foundation.

Nour’s works are held in major collections including the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; City of Chicago Public Art Collection; Sharjah Art Foundation; Asilah Municipality / UNESCO, Morocco; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; Southern Illinois University Museum; Bank of Paris, New York; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; and numerous public and private collections in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Amir Nour lived and worked in Chicago, United States.