Andre Elbaz

Andre Elbaz – Le Toréador amoureux, 1962

Born in Al Jadida in 1934, André Elbaz was studying at the École du livre in Rabat when he created his first collages for theater posters. Between 1955 and 1961, he studied at the Grande Chaumière and the École des beaux-arts in Paris, which allowed him to develop a multidisciplinary practice combining painting, engraving, photography, experimental cinema, and installation.

While André Elbaz was representing Morocco at the second Paris Biennale in 1961, Gaston Diehl, the French cultural attaché in Morocco, discovered his paintings and invited him to hold a series of exhibitions in French Institutes across Morocco. Elbaz then returned to the country, where he was appointed professor by Farid Belkahia at the École des beaux-arts in Casablanca. He left again in 1963 for London, and later France.

Although he was not directly part of the core group of the Casablanca School, his career engaged in a dialogue with Moroccan modernist research of the 1960s around abstraction, memory, and the decolonization of visual languages. André Elbaz built a body of work marked by experimentation and themes related to exile, historical violence, and collective memory.