Najia Mehadji
French, b. 1950
Najia Mehadji (born in Paris,1950) lives and works in Paris and Essaouira. By the 1970s, her oeuvre was marked by a “tangible abstraction” that derived 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 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 investigate 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 on an extra-mural scholarship from the Villa Medicis. Mehadji would later returned there producing her Icare series. This cycle came to a close in 1994 with the Coupole series, which signaled her interest in transcultural architectural forms. In 1996, she adopted 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. 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 She revisits the universal symbol of the pomegranate, whose stylized flower runs throughout her canvases. Her interest in floral and cosmic themes can also be seen in three series titled Pivoines, Vanités, and Volutes. Since 2005, she has been producing digital works that incorporate details from engraved plates by Goya.
Submitted by Galerie 110 Véronique Rieffel
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