Wilde

Painted in 1963, during the artist’s time in New York, Wilde is a remarkable example of Mohamed Melehi’s early approaches to his iconic wave and square motifs - emblematic of his elegant oeuvre. The richness of the blue and yellow in contrast with the earthy shades of the browns and the purity of the white create a sense of rhythm and movement within a two dimensional canvas. The sequence of the dotted yellow squares carry a peculiar meaning for the artist: ‘My act of painting became a lesson to me as my inner world was suggesting what I did not consciously know. I thus learned that the little squares I was painting were not just some decorative elements as I initially thought but a sort of language between Human and Science. [...] Today the little squares are a practical mean to identify people, things, and sounds’.

Coming from the Private Collection of Toni Maraini, Wilde holds an exceptional provenance linked to the artist’s personal and professional life. Maraini is a writer, poet, art historian and was a wife to Melehi himself, conferring to the work a particularly special history. Wilde has been highlighted in numerous shows around the world, including Mohamed Melehi at the Galleria Trastevere in 1963. The work was then also exhibited in New Waves: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School Archives at the Mosaic Rooms in London in 2019-2020 which later travelled to the Alserkal Arts Foundation in Dubai.

As one of the founders of the Casablanca School, socially engaged in international and local artistic dialogue through the integration of fine art, architecture, craft, and artistic movements such as Bauhaus and Afro-Berber design, Melehi has quickly established as one of the core Modern Middle Eastern artists of our times. After graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts in Tétouan and École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts Isabel de Hungaria in 1955, the artist moved to Italy in 1958, where he was introduced to leading artists of that time like Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, and Jannis Kounellis by Topazia Alliata, mother of Toni Maraini. Melehi’s work is held in international museum collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; L'Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.

We would like to thank Toni Maraini for her research contributions to this lot note.