Africa Exhibitions

In the context of events organized on the occasion of the "Year of Algeria in France", it seemed essential to stage an exhibition that retraces the tracks of the history of modern and contemporary fine arts in Algeria. The exhibition aims at acquainting the public with Algerian artists and their works produced since the 1920s in an attempt to provide details of the particularities, biases, and specificities connected to that country.

Whilst taking into account the practice of four consecutive artistic generations, the selection of artworks is closely bound to the questions and problems posed by the relationship between the "model" role played by Western culture and the singular and "ethnic" cultures of the artists.

Even if the origins of Algerian art history are associated with the rebirth of the miniature under the tutelage of Mohamed Racim – whose work is not shown in this exhibition – pieces by Azouaou Mammeri, Abdelhalim Hemche, and Mohamed Temmam confirm attempts to appropriate elements of modern art, from Impressionism to Fauvism, and to develop a distinct iconographic language.

From the 1920s to the beginning of the fifties, this generation further embraces other more personal or autodidact proposals of which the best-known representative is Haddad Fatma Baya Mahieddine (Baya), who exhibited at the Galerie Aimé Maeght already in 1947.

In those years, however, young artists also pursued other issues and claim for themselves the aesthetics of a synthesis between their heritage of Arab-Moslem calligraphy and Western abstraction. Mohamed Khadda, M’Hammed Issiakhem, Mohamed Louail, or Choukri Mesli impose and pursue work that asserts its importance once the country’s independence is retrieved; this finds confirmation in their participation, amongst others, in the gathering of 1967 established under the name of "Aouchem" – The school of pattern – which perpetuates this research and manner of expression.

In the years around the end of the War of Independence, an irrefutable rupture marks cultural life, a change that is most particularly verifiable on a structural level with the creation in 1963 of the "Union Nationale des Arts Plastiques" [National Union of Fine Arts]. If a certain preponderance for aesthetics close to Socialist Realism may be observed and the desire to privilege all "popular" art forms is seen in numerous public commissions of the time, the presence of artists more engaged in singular means of expression, of which Ismail Samson and Denis Martinez are among the most representative, is equally noticeable