The wife of France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Brigitte Macron, visited the Mehdi Qotbi Retrospective exhibition at the Arab World Institute (IMA) in Paris on Wednesday.
The exhibition features around one hundred works created since the 1960s, encompassing paintings, graphic art, tapestries, and ceramics. The works showcase how Moroccan artist Mehdi Qotbi laid the foundation for his unique style.
Macron admired Qotbi’s “hypnotic” work that she described as having “the power to take viewers into a unique universe.”
Through the retrospective, IMA is illuminating the painter’s world and creating a space for dialogue between cultures and imaginations. Influenced by Moroccan traditions and European art movements, Qotbi has developed a technique he calls “deconstruction,” essentially a new language that fuses Arabic letters and symbols.
Nathalie Bondil, the director of the museum and exhibitions at the IMA, said, “This retrospective provides visitors with the opportunity to immerse themselves in over fifty years of creation by artist Mehdi Qotbi and to appreciate the richness of his journey.”
The exhibition, which kicked off on Tuesday evening, will run until January 5, 2025, at the IMA.