Hadi Toron

As a career diplomat, Hadi Toron spent most of his life living abroad immersed in cultures as diverse as that of New York, Sudan and the Caribbean. As an artist, he found inspiration for his work in the life and culture of those places: the high glass and cement of New York City, the story of the Nile people and the serenity of the turquoise water of the Caribbean.

Toron's seduction of the people of Sudan, their intriguing traditions of Islam in Africa and their evocative spiritual dancing began while he was the United Nations' Representative in Khartoum. He has been working on the mystical Sudanese series for twenty years, each painting becoming a further distillation of what the traditional people of the Two Niles aim to achieve through their movements: spiritual enlightenment.