Ali Omar Ermes (Arabic:علي عمر الرميص, born 1945) was a Libyan artist and author. His paintings make use of Arabic calligraphy, often superimposed on a rich-textured ground, and may incorporate fragments of Arabic or other poetry or prose.^[1] He had lived in the United Kingdom since 1981, and was the chairman of the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in Kensington in west London; he was also active in other intellectual and cultural institutions in that city.^[1]

Biography

Ermes was born in Zliten in Libya in 1945. He studied at the University of Plymouth School of Architecture and Design in Plymouth in south-west England, and after his graduation in 1970 returned to Libya.^[1] There he wrote extensively and headed the visual arts section of All Arts magazine. In 1974 he was engaged as a "visual arts consultant" for the World of Islam Festival held in London in 1976, and visited many Islamic countries to identify possible participants in the festival.^[2]: 45 From 1981 he lived in the United Kingdom.^[1] Ermes has participated in various Muslim community projects, written about many important issues and has exhibited in some sixty to seventy exhibitions around the world.^[3]

Exhibitions

Ermes has shown work at the State Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia (November 2007); the Fowler Museum of the University of California, Los Angeles, USA (October 2007/8); the National Museum of African Art of the Smithsonian Institution, USA (May 2007); Word into Art at the British Museum in London, and later Dubai (2006 and 2008); East-West: Objects Between Culture at Tate Britain (September 2006/7) and Dubai International Financial Centre, Dubai (March 2008).

References

also the publication Signs of Our Times, From Calligraphy to Calligrafitti, edited by Rose Issa, Merrill publications, London 2016

Further reading

• M. Richardson (1988). The Alphabet of Ali Omar Ermes. Arts and the Islamic World 4 (4): 33–36
• V. Porter (2006). Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East (exhibition catalogue). London: British Museum, no. 18.
• Christine Mullen Kreamer, Mary Nooter Roberts, Elizabeth Harney, Allyson Purpura (2007). Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art. African Arts 40 (3): 78–91. (subscription required).
• Reem Abdelhadi, Luma Hameed, Fatima Khaled, Jim Anderson (2019). Creative interactions with art works: an engaging approach to Arabic language-and-culture learning. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching. doi:10.1080/17501229.2019.1579219. ISSN 1750-1229.