Galerie Claude Lemand

ARTISTS from ALGERIA - Donation Claude & France Lemand.

 Jean de MAISONSEUL (1912-1999)
 Louis NALLARD (1918-2016)
 Abdelkader GUERMAZ (1919-1996)
 M’hamed ISSIAKHEM (1928-1985)
 Mohamed KHADDA (1930-1991)
 BAYA (1931-1998)
 Choukri MESLI (1931-2017)
 Abdallah BENANTEUR (1931-2017)
 Souhila BEL BAHAR (1934-2024)
 Mohamed AKSOUH (1934)
 Denis MARTINEZ (1941)
 Mahjoub BEN BELLA (1946-2020)
 Rachid KORAICHI (1947)
 Abderrahmane Ould MOHAND (1960)
 Kamel YAHIAOUI (1966-2024)
 Zoulikha BOUABDELLAH (1977)
 Halida BOUGHRIET (1980)
 EL MEYA Benchikh El Fegoun (1988)
___

Claude and France Lemand’s pas­sion for the works of Abdallah BENANTEUR and their interest in non-European worlds have guided over time the con­sti­tu­tion of a remark­able col­lec­tion, which has been found in har­mony with France’s desire to create an Institute with a museum, in order to open eyes to artists from the Arab world and its dias­poras. Today, the national and inter­na­tional public can only be touched by the rich­ness and diver­sity of works cre­ated by artists from Algeria, more than 600 Algerian modern and con­tem­po­rary art­works in the col­lec­tions of the Institut du monde arabe’s Museum.

Through ALGERIA MY LOVE, the pres­i­dent of the Institute of the Arab World in Paris and the donors Claude and France Lemand will tes­tify to the great cre­ativity of three gen­er­a­tions of modern and con­tem­po­rary artists from Algeria and the dias­pora, despite the dif­fi­cult his­tor­ical, social and eco­nomic cir­cum­stances that these cre­ators went through. They wanted to bear wit­ness to the fra­ter­nity and sol­i­darity that have linked Algerian and French artists and intel­lec­tuals during the most dif­fi­cult years of their common his­tory, fra­ter­nity and sol­i­darity which con­tinue to this day.

ALGERIE MY LOVE is a song of the pain of the land and Algerian people col­o­nized and mar­tyrized, the song of the Algerian cul­ture and iden­tity denied and uprooted. It is also the song of freedom and hope, of the renewal of artistic and lit­erary cre­ativity and the announce­ment of a renais­sance, nec­es­sary and long awaited.

ALGERIE MY LOVE is the expres­sion of the love that all artists have for Algeria, those inside and even more those out­side, all these cre­ators from the dias­pora who can say, like Abdallah Benanteur: "Algeria is in me, only my feet have left it; my mind is always roaming around mine.".

ALGERIA MY LOVE will ques­tion the artistic, cul­tural and human impor­tance of the cos­mopolitan Parisian scene, a place of dia­logue between artists who came from all over the world during the decades which fol­lowed the end of the Second World War, and saw the ques­tioning of the colo­nial system and of European cen­trism. Artists of the three gen­er­a­tions and col­lec­tors-donors have been sen­si­tive to the attrac­tive­ness of the Paris of arts and cul­ture, its inno­va­tive spirit who decon­structed the hier­ar­chies that had pre­vailed in the art world and to these paradigm shifts whose effects are still being felt.

This col­lec­tion is not suf­fi­ciently rep­re­sen­ta­tive of cer­tain his­tor­ical artists, such as Jean de Maisonseul, Choukri Mesli, Rachid Koraichi, …; it is even non-exis­tent for visual artists who appeared in Europe in the 2000s, such as Yazid Oulab, Driss Ouadahi, Djamel Tatah, Bruno Boudjelal, Zineb Sedira, Kader Attia, Adel Abdessemed, Fayçal Baghriche, Abdelkader Benchama, Mohamed Bourouissa, Neïl Beloufa and many more. We hope that emblem­atic works by these artists will enrich the col­lec­tions of the new IMA museum.