Sliman Mansour, painter of Palestinian identity, dies at 79

Sliman Mansour, among the defining figures of contemporary Palestinian art, has died at the age of 79. His family announced the death on Monday in a post to his Instagram account.

The family wrote that "he leaves behind a life filled with beauty, memory, and a legacy that will continue to live", and said that what the world had lost as an artist they had lost as a father.

He was born in Birzeit, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, in 1947, and graduated in 1970 from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. The working life that followed ran for more than five decades.

His subjects returned to the land and to what displacement and occupation did to the people living on it. He worked traditional embroidery patterns and olive trees into his pictures, and the result was a body of images in which Palestinians could recognise themselves and their own history.

He also built institutions. In 1994 he was among the founders of the Al-Wasiti Art Centre in East Jerusalem, set up to keep Palestinian art in view and to hold together artists inside the country and those living away from it. He later sat on the founding board of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah.

That second half of the work is what outlasts a painter. A centre and an academy go on training people and holding collections after the artist who helped start them has gone, and for an art scene divided between the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza and exile, they are among the few places where the parts still meet.