Mohamed Melehi was a Moroccan painter, printmaker, designer, muralist, and teacher known for his use of bold, colourful, hard-edged, decorative Middle Eastern motifs found in local arts and crafts. In his exuberant abstract designs, curved flowing forms generate rippling parallel rhythms. A pioneer modernist as well as a post-colonial cultural activist, he was a co-founder of the Casablanca School.
Read MoreThis Moroccan painter—after graduating in 1955 from the School of Fine Arts, Tétouan and having his first show the following year in Tangier—continued his tertiary education in Seville, Madrid, Paris, and Rome (1957–1961) at a time when Moroccan contemporary artists were very rare.
In Rome, he befriended several modernist artists at the Trastevere Gallery, including Alberto Burri and Giuseppe Capogrossi. While at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Melehi bonded with two fellow Moroccans, and discovered a strong sense of North African and Pan-Arab cultural identity. He then left for Colombia University, New York on a Rockefeller grant in 1962, before returning to Morocco in 1964 to be inspired by North African and Arab crafts.
In 1964, Mohamed Melehi took a job teaching at Casablanca's School of Fine Arts, attracting other Moroccan teachers, artists, and art historians, and building up a research centre and creative collective for promoting Bauhaus design and other modernist projects blended with design attributes of Muslim civilization. He had the ability to make connections between what he discovered in the Arab and North African worlds and his knowledge of New York and Parisian avantgarde painting practices.
During his time in New York at Columbia during the early 1960s, Melehi was friends with many of the Leo Castelli Gallery artists, like Frank Stella and Jim Dine. Melehi began to embrace bright colour, abandoning black, and developed his predilection for order, geometry, flat colour, and decorative metaphors: especially, curved wave forms—often descending in a straight line diagonally or vertically—and rainbows, flames, and converging rays. The undulating wave forms first appeared in 1963, and he associated them with video tapes and broadcast television signals.
Early on in his painting career, Melehi used acrylic on canvas, but in 1970 he switched to cellulose car lacquer on wood, because it reflected the techniques of working-class tradesmen and not the elitism of fine arts or academia.
In Marrakech, he saw his ribbon-like motifs of colourful geometric abstraction as standing for liberation from draconian oppression, and founded a magazine allied with left-wing causes that promoted opposition to the U.S.-backed Moroccan government of King Hassan II. As restrictions began eventually to ease, Mehlehi acquired influential cultural administration positions in the government.
Examples of Melehi's artworks include Untitled (1970), Flamme (1975), Untitled (1979), Volcanic (1985), and Moucharabieh in Grey (2020).
Mohamed Melehi participated in many solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Arabian Moucharabieh, Lawrie Shabibi, London (2020); New Waves: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca School Archives, Concrete, Dubai (2020); New Waves: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2019); Mohammed Melehi: 1959–1971, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2017).
Group exhibitions include Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s, Grey Art Gallery, New York University (2020); Op Art in Focus, Tate Liverpool (2018–2021); Présence Plastique, Jemaâ el-Fna Square, Marrakech (1969); Hard Edge and Geometric Painting, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (1963).
Melehi's work is featured in the collections of the Tate, London; British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut.
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2022
