Ahmed Hajoubi

Presentation

Born in Guercif in 1972, Ahmed Hajoubi is one of Morocco's most talented contemporary artists. Since his first exhibition in 1993 and his graduation the following year from the Institut des Beaux-Arts in Tétouan, the artist has developed a protean body of work which, oscillating between drawing, sculpture, painting and installation, is a skilful exploration of childhood. Marked by a laborious treatment of matter and the option of rather austere objects, familiar to his imagination as the son of a druggist, his approach strikes by a constant jubilant mood, soliciting from the diversity of media the expression of an ingenuous wonder at the spectacle of the world. Each of Hajoubi's exhibitions is an event of mastery and, above all, a capacity for astonishment, demonstrating the ability of this art form to constantly rethink its vocabulary and modes of existence. In 2010, Hajoubi put an end to his twenty-year career as a communications agency director and headed off to the Cité des Arts in Paris for a 6-month stay. There, he deepened his reflections on wool, which, three years later, culminated in the exhibition “Qorchal” (literally, “Carde”), a turning point in his career. The artistic device he presents there confirms the hint of scarring in his earlier creations, notably the boats lost at sea, the charred cushions and the canvases in which his fetish character, the child magician, seems locked in deliberately chaotic interiors. Taking their cue from a childhood biographer linked to his mother, a scrupulous rhetoric charges the series of cards with aesthetic effects that speak as much of art's power to transform memory into new emotional possibilities as of creation's revenge on the physical and inner wounds of yesteryear. The literal presentation of cardboard is the common denominator in exhibitions up to 2020. Since then, the artist has said he is devoting himself to a new experience, one in which, beneath the most depersonalized appearances, an intimate confidence can still be heard. Several critical reflections are devoted to Ahmed Hajoubi's art, which is the subject of a significant number of acquisitions for institutional and private collections, both in Morocco and abroad. Source : https://www.soart-gallery.com/artists/139-ahmed-hajoubi/biography/