Mohamed Melehi

Mohamed Melehi (also transliterated Mohammed Melehi) was born on 12 November 1936 in Asilah, Morocco. He graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Tetouan in 1955, then continued his training abroad, studying in Seville and Madrid, and later in Rome and Paris. In 1962 he received a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to study at Columbia University in New York, where he spent roughly two years, returning to Morocco by around 1964.

Back in Morocco in the mid-1960s, Melehi became a leading voice of the Casablanca Art School alongside Farid Belkahia and Mohammed Chabaa, teaching at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca and championing an anti-colonial, materials-driven modernism that rejected easel painting's separation from everyday life. In 1969 he helped organize a landmark open-air group exhibition in Jamaa el-Fna Square in Marrakech, moving contemporary art out of galleries and museums and into a public square as a deliberately anti-elitist gesture. He later served as Director of Arts at Morocco's Ministry of Culture, in a post generally dated to the 1980s into 1992, and subsequently as a cultural adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation from 1999 to 2002.

Melehi died on 28 October 2020 at Ambroise Pare Hospital in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, after contracting COVID-19 during the pandemic in France, as reported by Wikipedia, The Art Newspaper, and The National.

Melehi is consistently described by museums, galleries, and the art press as one of the pivotal figures of Moroccan and Arab modernism, credited with bringing an international, hard-edge visual language into dialogue with North African material culture and post-independence politics. His inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's 1963 "Hard-Edge and Geometric Painting and Sculpture," his role in the 1969 Jamaa el-Fna Square exhibition, and retrospectives at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (1984) and the Institut du Monde Arabe (1995) established him early as a reference point for postcolonial abstraction. That standing has been reinforced more recently by the touring retrospective "New Waves: Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School" (The Mosaic Rooms, London; MACAAL, Marrakech; Alserkal Foundation, Dubai, 2019), by Tate St Ives's group exhibition on the Casablanca Art School, and by a 2024 group presentation at the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris. No exact, sourceable critical quotation could be confirmed for this profile, though obituaries in 2020 widely framed him, in substance, as a central "color" figure of Moroccan modern art.

Melehi's secondary market has strengthened markedly since his death in 2020, though it remains modest in scale relative to blue-chip postwar painters. The best-documented single result is Pyramidal (1984), which sold for EUR 200,264 (about MAD 2,099,200, roughly USD 218,000) at Artcurial, Paris, on 30 December 2023, in the themed sale "Un Hiver Marocain, From Jacques Majorelle to Mohamed Melehi," where Artcurial reported it as the top Melehi result of that auction; this figure rests on a single primary source without independent corroboration. A separate press report states that The Blacks (1963) sold for GBP 399,000 at a Sotheby's 20th Century Art / Middle East sale, a price that would exceed the Artcurial result, but the exact sale date could not be confirmed, so this profile does not designate a single confirmed all-time auction high. Other recent results point to a broadening market: a 2024 Sotheby's London sale of Mirage (1983) realized about USD 162,400, and an Artcurial sale in Marrakech reported strong prices for several of his prints and works on paper, including the lithograph Allah (1972) at over USD 112,000. Reporting also references a much higher figure attributed to a market database, but that number could not be tied to a specific work, house, or date and is treated here as unverified.

There is no confirmed published catalogue raisonne for Melehi, so provenance and documented exhibition history carry extra weight; since his 2020 death, his market has been handled mainly through the estate-affiliated Lawrie Shabibi and Loft Art Gallery. Auction volume is limited and individual results vary by medium, with paintings such as Pyramidal and Mirage setting the pace well above recent print and works-on-paper sales, though a separately reported, undated Sotheby's sale of The Blacks (1963) suggests the true ceiling for his market may sit higher than the best-dated result on record. Collectors should treat any single high figure with caution given the small number of public sales, and should rely on gallery and museum sources, rather than unverified market-database totals, when assessing value.