 | Farid Belkahia was born on 15 November 1934 in Marrakesh, Morocco; died on 25 September 2014 in Marrakesh, Morocco. One of the foremost modernist artists in Morocco, Belkahia was the director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Casablanca from 1962 to 1974. He was an active voice in the debates around post-colonial artistic modernism in Morocco. Belkahia turned away from oil painting and easels in the early 1960s and began working primarily with large-scale hammered copper. Since the mid-1970s, Belkahia is best known for the work he has done with leather, which he treats using traditional techniques and stretches over shaped supports. He then paints the leather with naturally occurring dyes such as henna. Belkahia has a consistent and carefully theorized taxonomy of symbols, shapes, and materials that resurface throughout his oeuvre. His work typically uses sinuous, organic shapes that recall bodies or corporality.
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 | Born on 3 March 1931 in Mostaganem, Algeria, Abdallah Benanteur is known for his modernist paintings and artists’ books. Benanteur studied at the School of Fine Arts in Oran, Algeria, before moving to Paris, France, where he continues to live and work. During the 1950s, Benanteur was associated with the École de Paris (the New School of Paris) and the École des signes (the School of Signs). His paintings, which include the Visiteuses (Visitors) series of oil paintings and gouaches dating from 1975, are largely abstract. Distinct from his paintings, Benanteur has produced over 1500 artist books since the late 1950s, often collaborating with contemporary Algerian poets or featuring the work of the Sufi mystics he discovered as a child. Benanteur’s work has been exhibited widely since the 1950s, most notably in a 2003 retrospective at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
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