A pioneer of Sudanese modernism, Hussein Shariffe was an acclaimed poet, painter and filmmaker whose expansive body of work crosses both European and African circles. Shariffe was an affiliate of the Khartoum School, a highly influential artistic movement that sought to incorporate modern abstraction with traditional Sudanese forms. Founded in 1960 by the artists Ahmed Shibrain, Kamala Ishagq and Ibrahim El-Salahi, their work spanned a larger transnational collective of artists and writers from the 1950s to 1970s involved in de-colonisation projects, such as Nasser’s Pan-Arabism.

Educated at Victoria College in Alexandria, Shariffe studied modern history at the University of Cambridge, before joining the Slade School of Fine Art where he studied under Lucien Freud; he had his first exhibition at the iconic Gallery One, London in 1957. In 2016 the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE held the retrospective exhibition The Khartoum School – The Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan (1945-present) celebrating Shariffe's paintings alongside other Sudanese artists from the period.