Ahmed Cherkaoui

Ahmed Cherkaoui – Untitled, 1964

Born in Bejaâd in 1934, Ahmed Cherkaoui studied at the École des métiers d'art and the Beaux-Arts in Paris, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he discovered the work of Paul Klee. This training enabled him to develop a singular body of work blending lyrical abstraction, traditional signs, and references to Moroccan popular arts.

Through a gestural and symbolic style of painting, Ahmed Cherkaoui drew inspiration from Berber tattoos, jewelry, carpets, and vernacular motifs to construct a plastic language freed from academic Orientalism. His compositions combine vibrant colors, abstract calligraphy, and organic forms in a quest where memory, spirituality, and modernity meet.

Exhibited in Europe and Morocco from the 1960s onwards, he contributed to the emergence of an internationally recognized Moroccan abstraction and profoundly influenced Moroccan modernist artists.

Despite his premature passing in 1967, his work remains an essential reference in the history of modern art in Morocco.

The Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris dedicated a retrospective to him in 1996, Cherkaoui ou la passion du signe (Cherkaoui or the Passion of the Sign).