Lot 31
  • 31

Hatem El-Mekki

Estimate
250,000 - 350,000 USD
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Description

  • Hatem el-Mekki
  • Les Réfugiés (The Refugees)
  • signed
  • oil on canvas, in two parts
  • Executed circa 1958.

Provenance

Private Collection, Tunisia (acquired directly from the artist in 1958)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited

Venice, 19th Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte, 1958 

Condition

This work is in very good condition. There is some very faint wear to the extreme 4 corner tips of the canvas. There are some very faint spots of media losses alongside the middle partition of the diptych; one approximately 15cm above the centre, and a further 20cm above it. There are some very light hairline stretching cracks above the centre of the right edge of the left panel. The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate.
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Catalogue Note

Born in 1918 in Jakarta, Hatem el Mekki is hailed as one of the most important painters in Tunisia. He is praised for his prolific body of work and diverse techniques; undoubtedly a direct result of the exposure he received during the rule of the French protectorate in Carthage. As the son of a Tunisian expatriate father and an Indonesian mother of Chinese origins, El Mekki spent his childhood in Bavaria in an environment filled with European and Asiatic artistic influences. He arrived in Tunis in 1924 where he studied at the Lycée Carnot. It was during these formative years that el Mekki developed his Chinese aquarelle technique, despite not knowing of his Chinese heritage. In 1932 he organized his first group exhibition at the Claridge art gallery in Tunis. Soon after he obtained a scholarship and moved to Paris as an artist in residence at the prestigious Cité Internationale des Arts. During this period, he transitioned to a career in artistic illustration for magazines, the most well-known being Marianne.

After returning to Tunis at the beginning of the Second World War, he held his first solo exhibition which was met with great success. Characteristic of his technique was a crossover between impressionist landscapes and depictions of poverty, a consequence of his formal training and the psychological impact of the war period. These influences in turn set his work apart from traditional impressionism, and have led his style to be categorized as bold and aggressive. The artist settled definitively in Tunisia in 1951 where he started a series of large-scale paintings in Khaznadar College. El Mekki is also well-known for a series of postal stamps he was commissioned to produce for the United Nations and a few other countries. 

Inspired by the end of colonial empires and the recent events of  the Tunisian and Algerian war, el Mekki’s style became politically impregnated. He welcomed international exposure by taking part in worldwide exhibitions in Cairo, across the United States, Germany and Korea where he was honored for his work. Considered as an engaged artist, he refused to be involved in any one ideological movement, and resisted falling prey to radical thinking. He often said that he did not go to war to pretend otherwise with a pencil and a brush. His pieces may appear as a sudden outburst of irrepressible anger and rebellion, however, he never pretended to exorcise our fears and demons. Like his contemporaries, he simply related events that touched him with his own personal stroke, questioning the real physical harm that comes from war and exile.

In a single scene The Refugees depicts the internal state of the artist; conditioned by decades of war and internecine strife. Through this work, El Mekki historicized loaded notions of identity and its ties to an ill-defined conception of homeland.  The mood is forlorn and insecure, represented in the characteristic el Mekki style with grey daubs scattered across a rust-coloured pallet. Deeply disturbed by the reports of death in media and his own eye-witness accounts, the  artist sought to represent homlessness and exile with a poignant intensity. Can men be refugees within their own land? Can men be refugees of their family and heritage as well, even refugees of their past political certitudes?  Within The Refugees, El Mekki meets these questions with an internal driving rage, refusing collective conciousness the right to forget the nightmares that haunt it.