Exodus

Born in northern Somalia in 1948, Aziz Osman is a painter, sculptor, and ceramic artist. He studied architecture and painting in Florence, Italy, where he lived for over fifteen years. After returning to Somalia, he was forced out of his country in 1991, at the onset of civil war. He arrived in Minnesota as part of the first wave of Somalis to resettle here. This work is in Osman’s characteristic style of colorful, geometrical shapes, interspersed with recognizable details like faces, hands, and a knife. The energy is one of disorderly movement, suggestive of the Somali Civil War that forced hundreds of thousands of families to flee their homes and leave behind the lives they knew.