Painter
Lalla Essaydi
Henna writing covers skin, fabric and walls until it becomes illegible: in Lalla Essaydi’s photographs, the odalisque of orientalist painting returns, this time as the author of her own image.
The artist
Career
Born in 1956 near Marrakech into a traditional family, Lalla Essaydi later raised her own family in Saudi Arabia before turning to art as an adult. She studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the early 1990s, where the nineteenth-century orientalist canvases in the city’s museums both fascinated and troubled her. She went on to Tufts University and took an MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2003, where photography became central to her practice.
Writing on the body
Her large photographic tableaux, carefully staged with Moroccan women from her circle, take apart the stereotypes of the veil, the harem and the odalisque. A self-taught calligrapher, she writes in henna on bodies, clothing and interiors, joining two visual languages long divided by gender: calligraphy, a male art, and henna, a female one. The script, deliberately unreadable, turns the image into a text the viewer cannot fully possess.
Landmarks
- 2002-2005 — “The Three Silences”, then “Converging Territories”
- 2005-2009 — “Les Femmes du Maroc”, which revisits Ingres and Delacroix
- 2009-2010 — “Harem”, photographed at the Dar al-Basha palace in Marrakech
- 2010 — “La Grande Odalisque” (2008) enters the collections of the Musée du Louvre
- 2011-2012 — “Bullets”
- 2012-2013 — “Revisions”, first retrospective, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian, Washington
- 2015 — San Diego Museum of Art; “Marvels and Miracles of Orientalism”, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
- 2017 — “Revival”, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington
Collections
- Musée du Louvre, Paris
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Art Institute of Chicago
- San Diego Museum of Art
- National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington
- Williams College Museum of Art; Cornell Fine Arts Museum
- Fries Museum, Leeuwarden
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In the same spirit
Discover works by Noureddine Daifallah, Abdelwahab Belkhayat and Hassan Hachchane, or browse all Moroccan works for sale.
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