Najia Mehadji: La Revelation du Geste /The Revelation of the Gesture

If one had to pick by chance the name of a contemporary artist - among a few others - whose biography and works synthesize East and West, it would be that of Najia Mehadji. Born in 1950, the Franco-Moroccan artist spent her childhood and teenage years in Paris. As early as the 1980s, she decided to divide her life between Paris and Essaouira, where she converted a studio for herself in the timeless countryside of the Haha tribal district. A graduate of the Université Paris 1, where she defended her master's thesis on Paul Cézanne, the artist has participated in numerous international exhibitions over the past twenty years, in New York, Paris, Rabat, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Beirut and elsewhere. Several of her works are in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Georges Pompidou and of the Institut du Monde Arabe, in Paris. Najia Mehadji's light-filled works create a feeling of plenitude, celebrating the union between body and mind and capturing the "timelessness of life."