The National Museums Foundation is organizing, from March 1, a documentary exhibition paying tribute to the founder of the Galerie L’Atelier, Pauline Demazière.
Pauline Demazière, founder of the Galerie L’Atelier, is considered a pioneer in the development of Moroccan artists who founded modernity, including the late Mohamed Melehi, Mohamed Chebaa, Farid Belkahia, Miloud Labied and Mohamed Kacimi. Other important figures of Maghreb-Mashreq plastic art to mention, notably the Iraqis Dia Azzawi and Saleh Jumai’e, the Lebanese Etel Adnan, the Egyptian Adam Henein, the Syrian Ghias Akhras, the Iranian Charles Houssein Zenderoudi ….
Given her rich career, where she has rendered, for more than twenty years in the field of exhibition and circulation of works, an enormous service to artists and amateurs, the National Museums Foundation (FNM) has made a point of rendering tribute to Demazière by organizing a documentary exhibition, in parallel with the exhibition event “Modernités Arabes”, at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. In a cross-dialogue, this tribute contributes to drawing up a common history of plural modernities.
The FNM has carefully selected archives and works to be presented in connection with the Arab world. A selection that bears witness to the visionary dynamism of the Gallery which, from its inception, intended to connect this vast geographical space, by creating bridges of exchange between the artists of modernity.
According to the Foundation, this tribute aims to highlight the vivacity and Moroccan artistic and cultural richness of those years, representing a decisive period in the advent of modernity in Morocco and on the international scene, including the Galerie L’ Atelier was an active and privileged player.
Indeed, the Atelier exhibited, for 20 years, nearly a hundred artists and has become, in this sense, an essential place in the city of Rabat as well as a crossroads of the young Arab artistic scene.