The artist

Abdelkader BENCHAMMA

Crédit photo : Hugues Lawson-Body

Abdelkader Benchamma 

Born in 1975 in Mazamet (France), Abdelkader Benchamma lives and works in Paris and Montpellier. 

Since 2019, he has been represented by the Templon gallery in Paris, Brussels, and New York. Internationally, he is represented by ADN Galeria in Barcelona and the Isabelle gallery in Dubai. 

A graduate of the Montpellier School of Fine Arts and the Paris School of Fine Arts, he has chosen drawing as his medium of choice. His drawn installations continuously challenge exhibition spaces, becoming, in his words, “spaces of resonance,” conducive to invoking memories, both individual and collective, geological and spiritual. His vast ephemeral murals are created directly with ink on walls, transforming architectures into an elsewhere, a world of flows and mental landscapes, straddling the recognizable and the indiscernible, at the border between the physical and the symbolic. Reflecting on the mechanisms of perception, his works explore our systems of knowledge, the survival of myths and beliefs, as well as reminiscences, and retinal or neural persistences. 

Winner of the Drawing Now Prize in 2015, he was invited the same year by the Drawing Center in New York to inaugurate their mural drawing program with “Representation of Dark Matter” (2015-2016). He was awarded the 1st Occitanie-Médicis Prize in 2018, which allowed him to be a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome. 

Solo Exhibitions in France and Internationally: Exhibition at the Het Noordbrabants Museum (HNBM) in the Netherlands (2024), “Solastalgia: Archaeologies of Loss” at the Power Plant, Toronto (2023), “Geology of Deluges” at the Schneider Foundation, Wattwiller (2023), “Fossil Ray” at the Lambert Collection, Avignon (2021), “Fata Bromosa” at MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (2019), “The Horizon of Events” at Centquatre, Paris (2018), and “Echoes of the Birth of Worlds” at the Collège des Bernardins, Paris during Nuit Blanche (2018), “The Great Invisible Battle” at the BlueProject Foundation, Barcelona (2016), and “Random” at FRAC Auvergne (2015). 

Group Exhibitions: “Capítulo IV : Historia” at Lago/Algo, Mexico City, Mexico (2023), “Stone Stories” at the Villa Medici, Rome (2023), “Syncopation” at the POLA Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan (2019), “Eldorama” at Lille 300, Lille (2019), “Melancholia” at the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2018), “Tamawuj” at the Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah (2017), “We Love Art…! Agnes b. Collection” at the Yvon Lambert Foundation, Avignon (2017), “The Future of a Promise” at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), “Told, Untold, Retold” at MATHAF, the Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2010). 

Learn more :
https://www.templon.com/fr/artists/abdelkader-benchamma/