Ousmane Sow, who has died aged 81, devoted himself to sculpture full time from 1978. That was when he returned for good to his native Senegal from France, where he had learned much about anatomy through working as a physiotherapist. He went on to gain an international reputation from using traditional techniques to produce distinctive larger-than-life figures.
Sow’s breakthrough came with his Nuba series, seven single pieces and five double ones, mostly of male wrestlers but with two female figures. The series was prompted by books of photographs of the Nuba people of southern Sudan taken by the German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and was first shown outside the French cultural centre in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, in 1987. He adopted the same approach with the Masai of Kenya and Tanzania, the Zulus of South Africa, and the nomadic Fulani of west Africa (including Senegal). His work was exhibited in France, at the Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany, in 1992 and at the Venice Biennale in 1995.
In 1999 Sow presented 75 pieces for an exhibition on the Pont des Arts, Paris, linking the Louvre and the Institut de France. The pieces came both from the African series and from a depiction of the 1896 Battle of the Little Bighorn, with Native American and US cavalry figures, some on horseback. In this encounter near the Little Bighorn river in Montana, a force of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors inflicted a decisive defeat on Lt Col George Custer’s 7th Cavalry regiment. Sow sought to capture the energy of people resisting oppression, and the show attracted 3 million visitors.
Up to that point Sow had been working with sacking and a paste – the composition of which he kept secret – built up around a metal frame. The result was rough but imitation was not Sow’s aim: “I find the scrubbed, shining finish of certain Greek sculptures rarely moves me … If you wanted precision, you could copy the wooden horses from roundabouts. They are perfect but have no life, no depth.” For the Little Bighorn figures he used a newly developed burning technique to make the sculptures more malleable and dramatic.
The resounding success of his Paris exhibition enabled him to experiment with bronze. His Victor Hugo (2002) in this medium was followed by Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Charles de Gaulle. In 2003, 24 humans and 11 horses from the Little Bighorn series were shown at the Whitney Museum in New York. Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Elderly Slave, celebrating an 18th-century Haitian revolutionary, was the centrepiece at the African Mosaic exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington in 2011. Two years later Sow was the first African and the first black artist to be made a foreign associate member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France.
Son of Moctar Sow and his wife, Nafi N’Diaye, Sow was born in Dakar. His disciplinarian father had a transport business. At the age of seven Ousmane attended a French school and studied the Qur’an in the evenings and at weekends. Later, while in France, he found solace in meditation and Hinduism, and believed in reincarnation.
His interest in sculpture was evident from a young age. In his teens he explored different formulas with glues and melted materials to build figurines. In 1957, after the death of his father, Sow left Dakar for France. After a series of menial jobs he attended a course on massage, and gained a diploma in nursing from Laennec hospital in Paris.. He went on to study with Boris Dolto, a pioneer in orthopaedics and kinesiology therapy. His professional skills as a physiotherapist provided not only financial stability but a knowledge of the human body.
Sow returned to Senegal in 1960, and in 1966 exhibited a bas-relief entitled Head of a Moor at the World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar. During a second period in Paris, he used his office as a makeshift studio to make a 16mm film using marionettes to tell the story of a visit to Earth by an extraterrestrial.
Sow’s final work, The Peasant, commissioned by the office of the president of Senegal, was completed a month before he died, and will be cast in bronze and installed at a conference centre near Dakar.
He is survived by a son, David, and a daughter, Ndeye.
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