KunstenaarTunisian-Swedish
Aly Ben Salem
1 actieve items
Aly Ben Salem described painting as a liberatory act of love, and that framing - expressive, personal, resistant to confinement - runs through his entire career. Born in Tunis on 25 December 1910 into a bourgeois family during the French protectorate, he became the first Tunisian Arab artist to graduate from the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, where he trained under Armand Vergeaud, completing his studies in 1933. He went on to exhibit at the Salon in 1934 and held his first solo show that same year at the Rotonde du Colisée gallery in Tunis.
In 1936 he received the Prix des Beaux-Arts from the Tunisian government - the first Tunisian Arab artist to receive this distinction. The following year, he won a prize from the French Ministry of North African Affairs, which enabled him to move to Paris. From 1937 to 1940 he lived in Montparnasse, at the centre of the European avant-garde, where he encountered Picasso, Braque, and Dali. He returned to Tunisia when the Second World War began and founded the École des Beaux-Arts de Sfax, teaching there until the school was destroyed during the conflict.
The 1950s brought a decisive change. Ben Salem moved to Sweden in 1950, where he would live until his death in Stockholm in 2001. The move was shaped in part by his relationship with Swedish textile artist Kerstin Nilsson, who became his second wife and his muse during what turned out to be the longest and most productive phase of his career. In Sweden he continued painting intensively while also supporting the cause of Tunisian independence from abroad.
His visual language is distinctive: elongated female figures, birds and fantastical animals, scenes drawn from both Mediterranean and Nordic life, rendered in luminous, decorative colour influenced by Persian and Indian miniatures. The dreamlike quality of the work - stylised rather than realistic, poetic rather than documentary - gives it a consistent character across very different subjects. Women, gardens, flowers, and birds recur in compositions where figuration and ornament are nearly inseparable.
Ben Salem received numerous distinctions across both countries. He was appointed Officer of the Swedish Royal Order in 1973 and awarded La Médaille de la Ville de Paris and Le Mérite National des Lettres et Arts de France in 1976. The Tunisian government promoted him to Grand Officer of Arts and Letters in 1992. His work is held in public collections including the Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Tunis. In 2024, his work was included in the major exhibition "Arab Presences: Modern Art and Decolonisation, Paris 1908-1988" at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, and he was the subject of a retrospective at Galerie Elmarsa in Dubai. That same year, his work was presented at the Venice Biennale for the first time.
In the Auctionist database, Ben Salem's 34 items appear across a range of Swedish regional auction houses, with Stockholms Auktionsverk, Örebro Stadsauktioner, and Uppsala Auktionskammare leading in volume. Works are predominantly paintings and gouaches. The top auction result in the database is 32,022 SEK for a figurative scene. His international record stands at approximately 22,243 USD for "Le Jardin d'Eden" at Sotheby's London in 2008, reflecting a collector base in both Scandinavia and the wider Arab world.