26.10.1978–present
Rachid Ben Ali
Rachid Ben Ali was born in 1978 in Taza, Morocco. At fifteen he was sent by his parents to the Netherlands, and he learned to paint largely on his own. In 2003 he won the KunstRAI award for young artists, and in 2005 the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen showed forty of his newest paintings. His work on the violence of extremism drew threats, and since then he has lived under protection.
Biography
Queen Beatrix chose one of his paintings to open an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The artist was not yet thirty.
Rachid Ben Ali was born on 26 October 1978 in Taza, in Morocco. At fifteen his parents sent him to the Netherlands. He is considered an autodidact. Later he studied at the Polytechnic of the Arts in Antwerp. According to other accounts, before Antwerp he had also studied at the art academies in Rotterdam and Arnhem. He lives and works in Amsterdam and London.
In 2001 and 2003 his work was shown at the Tanya Rumpff Gallery in Haarlem. Exhibitions of this period also took place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and at the Wereldmuseum (the world cultures museum) in Rotterdam. In 2003 he won the KunstRAI award for young artists. In 2005 the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in Amstelveen, near Amsterdam, showed forty of his most recent paintings. His painting shows the ethnic, religious and sexual tensions of Dutch society. He treats the violence of extremism satirically and polemically. John Frieze, curator at the Cobra Museum, described these bloody, violent and homoerotic pictures as a visual account of personal involvement with war, cultural and migration-related uprooting, homosexuality, religious intolerance and discrimination.
One of the paintings showed “hate preachers” spitting bombs. After it, Islamist militants in the Netherlands threatened him with death, and he went into hiding. Since then he has needed bodyguards, the cost of which the Cobra Museum has taken on.
In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País (February 2005) he said that he wanted to show that a person of Muslim origin can be completely free in thought, and that to start a conversation one has to break taboos.
Profile notes