Biography
One of the foremost modernist artists in Morocco, Farid Belkahia, began his training at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts of Paris from 1954 to 1959. He continued his studies in Prague until returning to Morocco in 1962, when he became the director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca, a position he held until 1974. Belkahia turned away from oil painting and easels in the early 1960s and began working primarily with large-scale hammered copper. While retaining multiple dimensions, the copper was meant to be hung on walls and was used to create bas-reliefs. Since the mid-1970s, Belkahia is best known for the work he has done with leather, which he treats using traditional techniques and stretches over shaped supports. He then paints the leather with naturally occurring dyes such as henna.
The process of working with both copper and leather is a vital aspect of Belkahia's work, and his work typically highlights not only the organic shapes that comprise the content of the work, but also the texture and dimensionality of the materials themselves. He has a consistent and carefully theoriszed taxonomy of symbols, shapes, and materials that resurface throughout his oeuvre. Belkahia's work typically employs sinuous, organic shapes that evoke the human form or corporeality. Many of his works feature triangles, arrows, and hands, often exploring questions of sexuality and identity. He frequently employs Tifinagh letters from the Amazigh alphabet and symbols derived from traditional visual culture within Morocco, including those found in rugs, tattoos, and architecture. Part of the interest of his work, however, is the way in which these symbols are re-constituted and re-imagined to become an integral part of his modernist visual vocabulary.
Belkahia was an active voice in the debates surrounding post-colonial artistic modernism in Morocco and contributed to the leftist cultural and intellectual journal Souffles when it first appeared. For Belkahia, incorporating the cultural heritage of Morocco into his shapes, materials, and techniques was a way of grounding international modernism within the local context. Under his leadership, the Casablanca Ecole des Beaux-Arts became known for developing a pedagogy that diverged from the traditional French model of easel paintings and still lifes, instead emphasising Moroccan visual culture and architecture. The pedagogy of the art school was closely linked to the artists' broader activities. With the artists Mohammed Melehi and Mohamed Chabaa (both of whom taught at the school), he formed the Casablanca group that first exhibited together in Rabat in 1966. In 1969, these artists, along with three other professors from the school, organized the Exposition Manifeste in Djemaa al-Fna in Marrakech. This open-air exhibition aimed to establish direct contact with a broader public beyond official art spaces. Later that same year, a similar exhibition was held in the Place du 16 Novembre in Casablanca.
Belkahia has had multiple personal exhibitions at major art venues in Morocco, including the National Gallery, Galerie Bab Rouah in Rabat, Galerie L'Atelier in Rabat, the Cultural Moussem of Asilah, the Batha Museum in Fes, and Galerie Delacroix in Tangier. He has also had international solo exhibitions, including those at Darat al Funun, Amman, and the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Nice. His work was represented in major early exhibitions of Moroccan modern art, including 2000 ans d'art au Maroc, Galerie Charpentier, Paris and the 1963 Rencontre International in Rabat, as well as the Paris Biennial (1959 and 1961), the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar (1966), the Panafrican Festival in Algiers (1967), and the First Arab Biennial in Baghdad (1974). More recently, his art was included in the exhibitions Présences artistiques du Maroc, Maison de la Culture, Grenoble, 1985; Quatre peintures du Maroc, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 1991; Interventions, Mathaf, 2009; and at the Museum of Modern Art, Johannesberg; the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and the Biennials of Venice and Lyon.
