Mehdi Qotbi artwork

Description

Mehdi Qotbi  (1951)

artist and president, moroccan national foundation of museums

He attended the School of Fine Arts in Rabat and devotedtwoyears (1968-1969) to painting. Whenhewas 17 years old, he knew artistic creativity was his passion. After meeting painter Jillali Gharbaoui, Qotbi was moved by the poetic quality of Gharbaoui’s work. Gharbaoui, who encouraged Qotbi to persevere in his poetic quest, helped him sell his first two paintings.

In 1969, Qotbi enrolled in Toulouse’s School of Fine Arts in France and graduated in 1972. He moved to Paris and started taking classes at the School of Fine Arts while teaching courses in drawing and painting. Shortly after enrolling, his work started to gain notoriety.

The originality of Qotbi’s artistic approach lies in the way he establishes a dialogue between writing and painting. He intertwines the two intimately and amorously by digging into his Muslim-Arab origins. He appropriates Arabic calligraphy in order to re-inventit, thus elaborating an imaginary ideography made of delicately embroideredlattice-like scriptural signs, painted with gouache, acrylic or ink. Qotbi’s moving artwork is not defined to any given genre. His work is at the crossroads of the figurative, symbolic and abstract art.