Chaïbia Talal was a Moroccan painter born in the small village of Chtouka. Married and widowed by the age of fifteen, she tells the story of her dreams saving her when, at twenty-five years old, strangers appeared to her and offered pens and leaves to draw on. Immediately inspired, she took up painting and was eventually the first Moroccan woman artist to lead an international career, initially through an encounter with the French curator Pierre Gaudibert in 1965. As a selftaught artist, her paintings are raw and unpredictable, colourful and neo-Expressionist, echoing the work of Asger Jorn and the CoBrA painting movement. At first, her work was not well received in Morocco, as it was seen as derivative of naïve and folk art amidst a maledominatedart scene. In 1966, after more than a decade of painting, Talal’s career took off in her appearance at an exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in Casablanca. That same year, she showed her work at Galerie Solstice and the Salon des Surindépendants at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, and over the next two decades in Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. In her dreamlike landscape of vivid colours and animated figures, which seem to be at times bursting out of the frame, women, children, and couples, as well as weavers, worshippers, and mourners, coexist in hectic rituals and strange harmony. Embodied by the artist whose clothes and body painting symbolized her intimacy with the spiritual, her art also incorporates popular, esoteric signs and beliefs. 

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION:

Couple (1967), oil on canvas, 55 × 73 cm. Courtesy of Collection Fondation Alliances - MACAAL and the artist’s estate