Casa
- Artist: Mohammed Melehi
- Date: 1970
- Medium: Cellulose paint on wood
- Dimensions: frame: 1219 x 1032 x 43 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the painting "Casa" by Mohammed Melehi, created in 1970 with cellulose paint on wood. The title is a short form for Casablanca, and the work itself reads as an abstract cityscape. Melehi’s signature “wave” motif—curved like Arabic calligraphy—rises vertically across the canvas, flickering like flames. The composition cuts diagonally, giving a sense of motion and rising energy. His time in New York in the early 1960s shows through, with hard‑edge abstraction and a pop‑inspired palette of red, yellow, orange, pink, green and blue. He also was a professor at the Casablanca Art School, where he pushed to decolonise art education, looking to interdisciplinary models like the Bauhaus. Together with peers like Farid Belkahia and Mohammed Chabâa, he forged a modern abstract language that reclaimed Moroccan visual heritage. "Casa" stands as a turning point, moving from canvas to wood and from acrylic to a lacquered cellulose surface, giving it a graphic, almost luminous quality.
See it in person
Casa is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
