Mahmoud Tounsi

Mahmoud Tounsi (Arabic: محمود التونسي; born December 13, 1944 in Menzel Temime, Tunisia, † April 12, 2001 ) was a Tunisian painter and writer.

Life

He attended primary school and then secondary school in Tunis in his hometown. Then he went to the Institute of Fine Arts in Tunis, where he studied with Abdelaziz Gorgi. Initially, in the administration and later employed by the office of the state broadcasting ERTT, he later became an art teacher at the high school in his hometown. On August 20, 1972, he married there Nesria Saidi. He lived for two years with her in Paris and returned in 1975 to Tunisia.

As a political activist, he was co-founder in 1977 of the National Freedom Council ( Conseil national des libertés ), which later became the Tunisian Human Rights League ( Ligue Tunisienne des droits de l' homme, LTDH ) was born. After he was active in the Mouvement des democrates Socialistes times, he later switched to the ruling Constitutional Democratic collection (RCD). In 2000 he was elected mayor of his hometown. He died a year later in a car accident.

Tounsi was known in the 1970s through his poems and short stories. Later, he began to take an interest in painting, took from the 1980s regularly in solo and group exhibitions and sold several of his paintings.