Nasser AlYousif

Nasser AlYousif was born in 1940 in the Al Hayayeek quarter of Muharraq, and over five decades became one of the defining figures of modern art in Bahrain. Painter, printmaker, teacher and organiser, he built a visual language out of the island's own materials: its gypsum ornament, its pearling songs, its birds, boats and thresholds. When blindness ended his seeing life in 1992, it did not end his working one. The prints he went on to make by touch are among the most singular works of late twentieth-century Gulf art.

Muharraq and formation

AlYousif's earliest memories were of colour and pattern: the gilded nails of a wooden chest in the house where he was born, the red and green of woven palm baskets, the carved gypsum facades he would later record, panel by panel, in his notebooks. He drew from childhood, on schoolbooks, on blackboards, in charcoal on the walls of the neighbourhood.

He was largely self-taught, and his formation owed much to two mentors. Abdulkarim Al Orrayed, his teacher at Western Primary School in Manama, recognised the boy's gift and brought him into the school's drawing society; Ahmed Al Sunni guided him through his secondary years. After graduating from the Teachers College in Manama in 1959, AlYousif himself taught art for thirteen years at the Khameez, Salmaniya and Al Gharbiya schools, and in 1963 attended Alexandria University for a course in geography and history, where he met the Egyptian artist Mustafa Al Bazzaz, who deepened his interest in folk tradition as a modern subject.

His public life as an artist began early. He first exhibited in 1956 with the Family of Art Amateurs, and in 1967 his work travelled with the Middle Eastern Art exhibition through seven Arab and three European cities. In 1969 his painting The Diver's Wedding appeared in full colour on the cover of the Kuwaiti magazine Al-Arabi, carrying his name across the region, and that same year he began the black-ink drawings for Ali Abdulla Khalifa's poetry collection The Thirst of Palms, published in Beirut in 1970 in four editions, a reservoir of imagery he would draw on for the rest of his life.

The society and the presses

AlYousif was a founding member of Bahrain's Contemporary Art Society, established in 1970, and served as its president from 1983 to 1986. He took part in every one of the society's exhibitions and in the Annual Fine Art Exhibition from its first instalment in 1972, when he was recognised among Bahrain's top ten artists; certificates of merit followed in 1977 and 1978, and he won the Delmon Award, the exhibition's principal prize, in both 1979 and 1980.

Alongside his art, AlYousif shaped Bahrain's cultural infrastructure directly. From 1972 to 1992 he was general manager and a partner of the Arabia Glass & Mirrors Company, and in the 1960s he founded Al Talib Stationery Store with his cousins, bringing artist's materials, books and periodicals on art history and technique into the country for the first time.

The decisive turn in his own work came at the Asilah Cultural Forum in Morocco in 1980. In the printmaking workshop of the Sudanese master Mohamed Omar Khalil, and before the work of Paul Klee, AlYousif found the medium that would occupy his maturity. On his return he imported Bahrain's first printing presses, taught the technique to fellow artists, and spent the following decade producing the zinc etchings shown in his 1988 solo exhibition, sponsored by Dar Al Ghad and held at the Bahrain Car Parks Company Building, and, in 1989, at the Norwegian International Print Triennial. Printmaking in Bahrain begins, in a real sense, with him.

In October 1982, together with the artist Ebrahim Busaad, he showed a joint exhibition at Bahrain's Alumni Club confronting Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the massacre at Sabra and Shatila: a rare and courageous political statement for a Gulf artist of his generation, foreshadowing the note of foreboding that runs through much of his later work. The same year he organised a further exhibition of zinc engravings at the Alumni Club, with Busaad, Abdulkarim Al Orrayed and Kamel Barakat.

Losing sight, finding insight

His eyesight began to fail in 1991; by 1992 he was fully blind. He was fifty-two, at the height of his powers, and the loss was absolute. What followed has few parallels in modern art.

AlYousif taught himself braille so that he could label his colours and continue to work. Between 1992 and 1995 he made a body of unique stencil and watercolour works, the braille period, feeling his way across the sheet, the labels telling his hands what his eyes no longer could. Then, from 1996 until 2004, came the celebrated linoleum prints: compositions cut entirely by touch, with scissors and gouge, their forms held whole in memory, the drummers, weddings, divers and birds of his Muharraq childhood returning with a clarity his sighted work had spent decades preparing.

When his sight was taken, he challenged the darkness with more of the light of art.

So wrote the artist Abdullah Yousuf, likening him to Beethoven composing in deafness. Bahrain honoured the late work as fully as the early: recognition in Sharjah in 1995 as a pioneer of the fine arts in the Gulf, and in 2001 the Al Dana Award, the Annual Fine Art Exhibition's highest honour, together with the Golden Palm Prize in Qatar. The exhibitions of these years, Challenge One (1998), Retrospective Exhibition (2000), Challenge Two (2003) and More Than Meets the Eye (2004), presented the blind work not as an epilogue but as a culmination.

Legacy

Nasser AlYousif died in Manama on 16 June 2006. A major retrospective was mounted at Bin Matar House, Muharraq, in 2017, and in 2019 Skira published the monograph on his life and work in Milan. His works are held in the permanent collections of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; the Bahrain National Museum; the Jordanian National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; the Sharjah Art Foundation; and the Barjeel Art Foundation. His prints were most recently shown at Sharjah Biennial 16 in 2025.

He wished to be remembered as he lived: as a witness. The houses, songs and working lives he recorded have largely gone; the works remain, and they are this island's memory of itself.