Mohamed Lekleti Taza, b. 1965

Mohamed Lekleti (born in 1965 in Taza, Morocco) lives and works in Montpellier, France. Trained in cinema and visual arts, he has developed a singular artistic practice rooted in drawing, while embracing a wide range of materials — from collage and mixed media to organic and textile elements — to compose dense, enigmatic visual narratives.

His work explores themes of displacement, metamorphosis, and memory through fragmented, tension-filled bodies and ambiguous figures in motion. Often rendered in black and white, these silhouettes seem inhabited by mythological echoes, historical fragments, and contemporary resonance. Drawing from oral traditions and symbolic archetypes, Lekleti constructs hybrid identities — part human, part animal, part machine — caught between shadow and transformation. He notably reinterprets chronophotographic principles to create layered images that blur the boundaries between time, gesture, and presence.

Awarded the Drawing Now Prize in 2011, Mohamed Lekleti has exhibited widely in France and internationally. Notable exhibitions include Palazzo delle Belle Arti in Turin (2012), Visa pour un territoire at the Forteresse de Salses – MNF (2013), Fuir at Fondation Blachère in Apt (2017), Me suis-je égaré at Musée Paul Valéry in Sète (2018), Khamsa at À Cent Mètres du Centre du Monde in Perpignan (2019), Drawings of the Arab World at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (2021), Incarnations: The Body at MAC Lyon (2023), and 110 Years, 110 Works at the Mohammed VI Museum in Rabat (2023).

His works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), MAC Lyon, FRAC Picardie, CNAP (France), the Detroit Museum (USA), the Mohammed VI Museum (Rabat), as well as the Société Générale, Blachère, and Kamel Lazaar Foundation (Tunisia/Switzerland).

Through a rich, fragmented, and deeply poetic visual language, Mohamed Lekleti questions bodies, borders, and the spaces in-between. His drawing practice, always in motion, becomes a space of resistance and reinvention, where the intimate and the universal are closely intertwined.