MOHAMED SAÏD CHAIR
Biography
Sans titre, 2024
MOHAMED SAÏD CHAIR WAS BORN IN 1989. HE LIVES AND WORKS IN TANGIER, MOROCCO.
A self-taught artist, Mohamed Saïd Chair began his career in finance before fully dedicating himself to his passion for painting. Driven by a fascination with humanity and its representations, he has developed a practice centered on portraiture, deeply influenced by the raw and introspective expression of Lucian Freud.
His work, executed primarily in oil, demonstrates a sharp attention to anatomy and bodily detail. With variations of drapery, use of verdaccio, and precise rendering of volumes, Chair draws on the legacy of the old masters — from the Italian Renaissance to Flemish and French classical painting — to revive academic techniques in the service of profoundly contemporary themes, such as modern alienation, mass culture, and the impact of social media on our perception of the individual.
Deliberately concealing his models' faces in favor of their bodies, he subverts the conventions of traditional portraiture to propose a renewed interpretation — one in which identity is constructed through the sometimes absurd or theatrical staging of the human figure. Like a director, he designs and physically embodies his characters’ poses before translating them into paint, giving each work a performative as well as introspective dimension. His art offers a sharp reflection on the role of the gaze, detail, and intimacy in our image-saturated age.
Since 2013, Mohamed Saïd Chair has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Morocco and internationally, including at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Tetouan, the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Morocco), the Gandur Foundation for Art (Switzerland), and the Piasa auction house (France). He has also participated in several artist residencies, notably at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (Connecticut, USA), the Montresso Art Foundation – Jardin Rouge (Marrakech), and the French Institute in Tangier.