Chaïbia Talal (1929-2004) was a Moroccan painter born in Chtouka, a small village near El Jadida, Morocco. She was married at the age of thirteen, before having a son, and became a widow at fifteen. Her own storytelling is that her dreams saved her when at 25 years old some strangers appeared to her and offered her pens and leaves to draw on. Immediately inspired, she took up painting and was eventually the first Moroccan woman artist to make an international career, especially through an encounter with the French curator Pierre Gaudibert in 1965. As selftaught artist, her paintings are raw and unpredictable, colorful and neo-expressionist, raising some echoes of Asger Jorn and the CoBrA painting movement. At first, her work was not well received in Morocco, as she was seen as a derivative of naïve and folk art, in a male-dominated art scene (even if artists from the Casablanca Art School, such as Mohamed Melehi and Farid Belkahia, defended her as a respectable artist). In 1966, after more than a decade of painting, Chaïbia’s career really took off when she was featured in an exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Casablanca, getting international recognition. That same year she showed her work at Galerie Solstice and the Salon des Surindépendants at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; and over the next two decades in Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. In her dreamlike landscape of vivid colors and animated f igures, which seem to be at times bursting out of the frame, and other times dissolving, women, children, and couples, as well as weavers, worshippers, and mourners, coexist in hectic rituals and strange harmony. As fully embodied by the artist whose clothes and body painting symbolized her intimacy with the spiritual, her art also speaks about popular and esoteric signs and beliefs. Contrary to some public preconceptions, Chaïbia was not isolated from the rest of the Moroccan art scene, as she regularly featured in collective and national exhibitions; she was especially invited to create large-scale murals for the Cultural Mous sem of Asilah Festival, and also joined the artists’ group invited to collaborate with the patients of the Berrechid psychiatric hospital (all beginning 1980s). Before she passed away from a heart attack, Chaïbia Talal received the Golden Medal from the Society of the French Academy of Education and Encouragement.