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Lot Essay
“I started painting with vertical lines, eliminating colour almost completely, working with black on black, and white and grey. To me, at that period, to paint surfaces that were almost monochrome, with very minimalistic compositions, felt like making a prayer. I was materialising my Zen thinking, but I was also going back to my Islamic Sufi roots. To learn about Zen is quite easy, but very difficult at the same time. It is quite hard to explain in words, and difficult to communicate with another person about.”
– Mohamed Melehi (Mohamed Melehi in conversation with Morad Montazami, The Mosaic Rooms in London, 6 June 2019)
Mohamed Melehi occupies a pivotal position in the history of postcolonial Moroccan art and in the broader development of modernism across Africa and the Global South. A multifaceted artist, photographer, muralist, educator and cultural activist, he one of the founding members of the Casablanca Art School during its most radical period, between 1964 and 1969. His early encounters with abstraction in Rome and New York proved formative, shaping a visual language that would continue to evolve across painting, photography, muralism and other media. At the heart of this practice lay a sustained engagement with abstraction as a means of reconciling international modernism with questions of cultural identity.
Painted in 1962, this work belongs to Melehi’s important series of black works, executed between 1960 and 1962, which reflects the artist’s formative years at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. During this period, Melehi frequented the studio of the Italian artist Toti Scialoja, where he experimented with a technique he called bianco e nero, working exclusively in black and white. This was a decisive period in the artist’s life: it was during this time that he met Toni Maraini, who would become his second wife and lifelong creative partner, and with whom he would later play a foundational role in shaping the Casablanca Art School. He also met her mother, the artist and gallerist Topazia Alliata, who exhibited and championed Melehi’s early work at her gallery, the Galleria Trastevere — from which the present painting originates — and helped him secure a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship that took him to New York, where he became acquainted with contemporary American art forms.
This radical reduction of colour opened a new field of investigation for the artist, drawing him towards an increasingly minimalist language while exposing him to a range of avant-garde ideas, from cybernetics to Zen philosophy. His engagement with these ideas was not merely formal, but became deeply bound up with his evolving understanding of identity.
Melehi recalled the profound influence of philosophical texts including Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1948) and Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen (1957). Reflecting on this encounter, he observed: “Zen philosophy reminded me of Islamic Sufism, and so paradoxically helped me to be in a position to recover my identity. I went to the West to learn Western things, but at the same time I came upon Eastern things, such as Zen, and this drove the evolution of my view on things” (M. Montazami, "Mohamed Melehi in conversation with Morad Montazami", in Third Text, Feburary 2021). For Melehi, the encounter with Western modernism thus became paradoxically intertwined with a rediscovery of his own cultural and spiritual heritage — a synthesis that would prove fundamental to the development of his mature visual language.
The work embodies this search for equilibrium through a composition that finds balance within apparent imbalance. Its surface is divided into two contrasting black and white fields, bisected by a subtly tilted diagonal line. Cutting through this division is a twisted, ribbon-like silver form that runs the length of the canvas, appearing to stitch the two segments together even as it disrupts their geometric stability. The tension between these elements creates a dynamic equilibrium: opposing fields are held in dialogue rather than resolved, while the central vertical form — a wave-like line that animates the canvas with quiet elegance — introduces a sense of movement into an otherwise rigorously controlled composition, offering both compositional and aesthetic balance.
The work’s restricted palette and reductive geometry exemplify the radical experimentation of Melehi’s black works, while its underlying sense of rhythm and balance anticipates the dynamic abstraction that would come to define his later practice. The black and white cease to function simply as opposites; instead, they become complementary forces within a constantly shifting visual field. The work can therefore be understood both as an investigation into the fundamental principles of abstraction and as an early articulation of Melehi’s broader search for a visual language through which seemingly opposing systems — East and West, tradition and modernity, spirituality and abstraction — might coexist. Created at a pivotal moment in the artist’s development, this canvas captures the intellectual and formal tensions from which Melehi would forge one of the most distinctive vocabularies of Moroccan modernism.
Beyond painting, Melehi worked across photography, muralism, graphic design and education, and remained a committed cultural activist throughout his career, notably helping to organise the Asilah Cultural Moussem, an annual arts festival in his home town. Alongside Farid Belkahia and Mohammed Chabâa, he helped steer Moroccan art away from easel painting and the gallery system, advocating instead for public murals and integration into everyday life. His distinctive wave motif, developed from the mid-1960s onward, became one of the most recognisable visual signatures of postwar Arab abstraction.
His work is held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Institut du monde arabe, Paris; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi; the Musée d'Art Contemporain Africain – Al Maaden (MACAAL), Marrakech; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah and the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF), Beirut. In 2017, he was honoured with a retrospective at Mathaf, and his work has since featured in major group exhibitions, including The Casablanca Art School, which travelled from Tate St Ives to the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2023–2024, and Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, held at the Barbican Centre, London, in 2026.
– Mohamed Melehi (Mohamed Melehi in conversation with Morad Montazami, The Mosaic Rooms in London, 6 June 2019)
Mohamed Melehi occupies a pivotal position in the history of postcolonial Moroccan art and in the broader development of modernism across Africa and the Global South. A multifaceted artist, photographer, muralist, educator and cultural activist, he one of the founding members of the Casablanca Art School during its most radical period, between 1964 and 1969. His early encounters with abstraction in Rome and New York proved formative, shaping a visual language that would continue to evolve across painting, photography, muralism and other media. At the heart of this practice lay a sustained engagement with abstraction as a means of reconciling international modernism with questions of cultural identity.
Painted in 1962, this work belongs to Melehi’s important series of black works, executed between 1960 and 1962, which reflects the artist’s formative years at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. During this period, Melehi frequented the studio of the Italian artist Toti Scialoja, where he experimented with a technique he called bianco e nero, working exclusively in black and white. This was a decisive period in the artist’s life: it was during this time that he met Toni Maraini, who would become his second wife and lifelong creative partner, and with whom he would later play a foundational role in shaping the Casablanca Art School. He also met her mother, the artist and gallerist Topazia Alliata, who exhibited and championed Melehi’s early work at her gallery, the Galleria Trastevere — from which the present painting originates — and helped him secure a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship that took him to New York, where he became acquainted with contemporary American art forms.
This radical reduction of colour opened a new field of investigation for the artist, drawing him towards an increasingly minimalist language while exposing him to a range of avant-garde ideas, from cybernetics to Zen philosophy. His engagement with these ideas was not merely formal, but became deeply bound up with his evolving understanding of identity.
Melehi recalled the profound influence of philosophical texts including Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1948) and Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen (1957). Reflecting on this encounter, he observed: “Zen philosophy reminded me of Islamic Sufism, and so paradoxically helped me to be in a position to recover my identity. I went to the West to learn Western things, but at the same time I came upon Eastern things, such as Zen, and this drove the evolution of my view on things” (M. Montazami, "Mohamed Melehi in conversation with Morad Montazami", in Third Text, Feburary 2021). For Melehi, the encounter with Western modernism thus became paradoxically intertwined with a rediscovery of his own cultural and spiritual heritage — a synthesis that would prove fundamental to the development of his mature visual language.
The work embodies this search for equilibrium through a composition that finds balance within apparent imbalance. Its surface is divided into two contrasting black and white fields, bisected by a subtly tilted diagonal line. Cutting through this division is a twisted, ribbon-like silver form that runs the length of the canvas, appearing to stitch the two segments together even as it disrupts their geometric stability. The tension between these elements creates a dynamic equilibrium: opposing fields are held in dialogue rather than resolved, while the central vertical form — a wave-like line that animates the canvas with quiet elegance — introduces a sense of movement into an otherwise rigorously controlled composition, offering both compositional and aesthetic balance.
The work’s restricted palette and reductive geometry exemplify the radical experimentation of Melehi’s black works, while its underlying sense of rhythm and balance anticipates the dynamic abstraction that would come to define his later practice. The black and white cease to function simply as opposites; instead, they become complementary forces within a constantly shifting visual field. The work can therefore be understood both as an investigation into the fundamental principles of abstraction and as an early articulation of Melehi’s broader search for a visual language through which seemingly opposing systems — East and West, tradition and modernity, spirituality and abstraction — might coexist. Created at a pivotal moment in the artist’s development, this canvas captures the intellectual and formal tensions from which Melehi would forge one of the most distinctive vocabularies of Moroccan modernism.
Beyond painting, Melehi worked across photography, muralism, graphic design and education, and remained a committed cultural activist throughout his career, notably helping to organise the Asilah Cultural Moussem, an annual arts festival in his home town. Alongside Farid Belkahia and Mohammed Chabâa, he helped steer Moroccan art away from easel painting and the gallery system, advocating instead for public murals and integration into everyday life. His distinctive wave motif, developed from the mid-1960s onward, became one of the most recognisable visual signatures of postwar Arab abstraction.
His work is held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Institut du monde arabe, Paris; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi; the Musée d'Art Contemporain Africain – Al Maaden (MACAAL), Marrakech; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah and the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF), Beirut. In 2017, he was honoured with a retrospective at Mathaf, and his work has since featured in major group exhibitions, including The Casablanca Art School, which travelled from Tate St Ives to the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2023–2024, and Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, held at the Barbican Centre, London, in 2026.