Elmarsa Art Gallery in Alserkal avenue pays tribute to self-taught Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine through showcasing 15 of her gouache paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Known simply as Baya, she is still one of the most celebrated artists in Algeria, more than two decades after her death. Her paintings \u201cmostly represented women, animals, plants, sometimes villages. Her figures are dressed in large and beautiful colourful dresses covered in flowers, fruit,\u201d with birds springing out like bouquets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although her paintings in this collection\ndo not follow a specific theme, their distinctive style of bold, \u201ccolourful\nsurreal and childlike imagery,\u201d have drawn people to them over the past seven\ndecades including \u201cleading figures, Henri Matisse, George Braque and Pablo\nPicasso, with whom she collaborated with in the renowned Madoura ceramics\nstudio in Vallauris in 1949,\u201d as stated in Elmarsa Art Gallery\u2019s description of\nBaya. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe came up with this exhibition, which is\nalso her second international exhibition as a way to show our respect to such\nan important figure in history. She was\nconsidered a member of what I like to call the \u2018intellectual artists\ncircle\u2019\u2026Baya was also the inspiration behind Picasso\u2019s \u2018Women of Algeria,\u2019\nwhich is one of his most famous works,\u201d Sharon George, the gallery\u2019s\nadministrator told the MBRSC Post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was born as Fatima Haddad in Bordj el-Kiffan (Algeria) in a poor family in 1931. She started drawing and painting at a very young age. She was orphaned at the age of five and was “discovered” by a French woman, whom she considered her adoptive mother, where she worked as a maid. This later led to a breakthrough, when she had her first exhibition in Paris at the age of sixteen after her watercolour paintings were discovered by sculptor, Jean Peyrissac, and French gallerist, Aim\u00e9 Maeght.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Baya later married a much older musician, El Hadj Mahfoud Bahieddine, and had six children. She briefly stopped painting around 1955 due to the Algerian war of independence from France, according to the Barjeel Art Foundation, but continued in the early 1960s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her works have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in France, according to Elmarsa Art Gallery. Baya passed away on the 9th<\/sup> of November, 1998 due to an illness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Baya\u2019s works continue to be celebrated\nworldwide due to their uniqueness. \nElmarsa Art gallery, which is dedicated to showcasing modern and\ncontemporary artworks from North Africa, will continue to exhibit Baya\u2019s\npaintings until the 15th<\/sup> of June. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elmarsa Art Gallery in Alserkal avenue pays tribute to self-taught Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine through…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":5051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5048"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5048"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5052,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5048\/revisions\/5052"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mbrsc.aud.edu\/MBRSCPost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}