Najia Mehadji

Najia Mehadji was born in Paris in 1950. She lives and works in Paris (France) and Essaouira (Morocco). By the 1970s, Mehadji’s oeuvre was already marked by a “tan­gible abstrac­tion” that derived simul­ta­ne­ously from con­tem­po­rary music and from her work on the body in the exper­i­mental envi­ron­ment of the Université de Paris VIII. During this period she pre­sented sev­eral per­for­mances that incor­po­rated drawing and sound; she also con­tributed to the fem­i­nist review Sorcières, which pub­lished her early draw­ings.

In 1974 she earned a master’s degree in visual arts and art his­tory from the Université de Paris I, and also attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 
In the 1980s, Mehadji began to inves­ti­gateter­ro­gate the mate­rials of pic­to­rial prac­tice. She decided to employ unusual media such as gesso and trans­parent paper on large pieces of raw canvas in order to gen­erate sym­bolic, highly archi­tec­tured, geo­metric forms.

In 1985 she spent a year in Essaouira, Morocco, on an extra-mural schol­ar­ship from the Villa Medicis. Mehadji would later return there with increas­ingly fre­quency, pro­ducing her Icare series in Essaouira. This cycle came to a close in 1994 with the Coupole series, which explic­itly referred to Islam and sig­naled her interest in tran­scul­tural archi­tec­tural forms.

In 1996, Mehadji changed tech­nique and hence style, adopting large oil pas­tels that enabled her to draw long, con­tin­uous lines on raw canvas, gen­er­ating spheres of pure reds or yel­lows, which yielded three series known as Gradients, Chaosmos, and Souira.

In 1997 she taught drawing for a year as a guest artist at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Her recent works dis­play a sym­bolism related to nature, notably to the cosmos and the plant kingdom, estab­lishing a log­ical coun­ter­point to the geo­metric forms of her early career. Hence the “struc­tures of flux” as exem­pli­fied by the Fleur-flux series, in which Mehadji revisits the uni­versal symbol of the pomegranate, whose styl­ized flower runs throughout her can­vases, draw­ings, and water­colors.

Her interest in floral and cosmic themes can also be seen in three series titled Pivoines, Vanités, and Volutes. Since 2005, Mehadji has been pro­ducing dig­ital works that incor­po­rate details from engraved plates by Goya.

White danse exhibition at La Chapelle des Dames Blanches in La Rochelle from May 19 to July 5

The Opening of the exhibition will take place June the 4th at 6 p.m (by appointment, please contact 05 46 51 53 78).