Mostafa Al Hallaj

Mostafa Al Hallaj (1938 to 2002) was a Palestinian artist born in Salama, a village near Jaffa, who spent his later life in Damascus. He trained as a sculptor but became known for black and white prints cut into wood and masonite. In these prints, figures, animals and symbols are set against cut areas of pattern and texture. He also made paintings, murals and book covers.

His family left Palestine in 1948 and reached Damascus before he moved to Egypt. He studied sculpture at the College of Fine Arts in Cairo, graduating in 1964, and then attended the postgraduate Luxor Atelier. His images drew on Canaanite and Egyptian sources, folk tales and Palestinian history. The linocut Lydd (1965) is named after the Palestinian city. The woodcut Sabra and Shatila (1993) responds to the massacre of 1982 in Beirut. His late masonite print Self-portrait as Man, God, the Devil (1996 to 2002) includes three portraits of the artist.

He lived in Beirut from 1974 to 1982. He lost about 25,000 prints there in the Israeli attacks of 1982 but saved his cut blocks. In Damascus he helped found a gallery dedicated to the cartoonist Naji al-Ali. He took part in the Karameh exhibition in Amman in 1969 and in an exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, in 1981. He won a printmaking prize at the Alexandria Biennale in 1968. He died in December 2002 after a fire in his Damascus studio. His prints were later shown in Made in Palestine at the Station Museum, Houston, in 2003 and in On This Land in Dubai in 2023. The Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah holds his work.