Yto Barrada

Further exhibition highlights include recent textile works which reference Frank Stella’s series of fluorescent paintings, inspired in part by Moroccan cities. Barrada’s textiles expand the set of references for these patterns and motifs, transposing the colors and forms of Stella’s paintings using dyes made in her studio from plants and insects. These new textile works are equally inspired by the Moroccan painters Mohamed Chebaa, Farid Belkahia, and Mohammed Melehi, founders of the Casablanca School in the 1960s, who paved the way for a North African modernism whose abstraction embraced the motifs and materials of popular, local art forms.

Concurrent with Pace’s exhibition, Barrada’s Agadir 1960 installation will be featured in the Imagined Nations / Modern Utopias section of the Gwangju Biennale curated by Clara Kim and staged from 7 September to 11 November 2018. Barrada’s presentation will comprise four different elements - mural drawings, a new film commission, furniture and collages - which will come together in a singular work to address the reconstruction of Agadir, Morocco, following a devastating earthquake in 1960. “1960 is a time of decolonization and the resentments and ruins at the end of empire; the spreading fissures of the Cold War; the growing realization that violence is one of the implacable vectors of modernity. Thus after the disaster, the question of how to rebuild and reinvent Agadir was a question of identity made concrete. [...] Beneath all this we sense the warp and weft of the personal and political; the premonitions and regrets and hopes of a country on the verge of modernity.” Barrada said about the project.

Yto Barrada: Klaatu Barrada Nikto remains on view at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, USA until 25 November 2018.