Painter, sculptor and print artist Malika Agueznay is a leading figure as a woman for Moroccan modern and contemporary art. She studied at the Casablanca Art School between 1966 and 1970, during the golden age and pedagogic revolution led by Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, and Mohammed Chabâa. Agueznay is one of the rare women artists who studied during this time at the Casablanca Art School and is still active to this day. She studied alongside other important artists such as Abdallah Hariri, Houssein Miloudi, and Abderrahmane Rahoule.
She is known for her landmark seaweed pattern, which finds various applications (from printmaking and painting with and without relief to woodcut) and ramifications. The pattern functions as cellular structures growing and proliferating organically in abstract landscapes – a polymorphous and fluid pattern either used as an all-over visual strategy or linked to calligraphic text, between botanical arborescence and feminine anthropomorphic evocations. Agueznay’s aquatic or atmospheric compositions – blending oceans, constellations, and suns – can also be seen as a decorative and feminine response to Western kinetic and minimalist art.
Among the different Casablanca Art School platforms and interrelated events, Malika Agueznay was an important actor in the Cultural Mous sem of Asilah Festival, where artists were invited to paint murals from 1978 on. She was especially active in the printmaking studio. Since the f irst edition of the festival, she took this important role in the workshop of Roman Artymowski before studying printmaking with Mohammad Omar Khalil and Robert Blackburn in New York. Agueznay, who took the lead at the Asilah studio when Khalil left it, is the first woman printmaker in Morocco.
In 1981, Agueznay was part of a group of artists and activists (including Mohamed Melehi, Mohammed Chabâa, and Chaïbia Talal) who were invited by the psychiatrist Abdellah Ziou Ziou to organize an artistic-collaborative program (including mural paintings and cinema), involving the patients of the Berrechid hospital on-site, as a way of rehabilitating the role of psychiatry and mentally ill people within Moroccan society, to save them from total marginalization. Agueznay collaborated closely with the art historian and anthropologist Toni Maraini for the program devoted to the women patients of the hospital.
Agueznay’s organic abstractions have many points of origin within the same cosmogony or system of signs.
