Ousmane Sow

Ousmane Sow, born on October 10, 1935, in Dakar, and died on December 1, 2016, in the same city, was a Senegalese sculptor. Ousmane Sow was born in Dakar to a mother from Saint-Louis and a father from Dakar, thirty years his senior. He grew up in Reubeuss, one of Dakar's toughest neighborhoods, where he received an extremely strict upbringing during which his father instilled responsibility in him from a very young age. From his father, he inherited rigor, a sense of duty, and a free spirit. After his father's death, and despite his deep affection for his mother, he decided to leave for Paris, penniless. While working various odd jobs, and after giving up his studies at the School of Fine Arts, he earned a degree in physiotherapy. Why did Ousmane Sow sculpt? Out of basic necessity, his family would say. As a child, he began sculpting stones he collected along the beach in Dakar, and later, as a physiotherapist in his Parisian practice, he continued to mold the paste used as plaster for patients' fractures. He animated and filmed these small figures to bring them to life. It was like a need to breathe; he had to mold. He became a physiotherapist to sculpt the human body and a sculptor to mold his famous material, which he calls "my product." Although he had been sculpting since childhood, it was only at the age of fifty that he made sculpture his full-time profession. But the physiotherapy he practiced until then undoubtedly contributed to the magnificent sense of anatomy fo…