If we wanted to randomly pick one contemporary artist among others who, by her biography and works, symbolises the union between the East and the West, it would be Najia Mehadji.
This Franco-Moroccan or Moroccan-French artist who was born in 1950, spent her childhood and teenage years in Paris, with regular trips to Fès where her family comes from, was a graduate of the Université Paris I where she defended her thesis on Paul Cézanne in 1973 and a student of the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris. She has been exhibiting in Paris galleries since the 80s and, in 1985, she decided to divide her time be- tween her studio in Paris and her studio in Morocco, near Es- saouira, in the Haha region, in a douar she converted into a traditional open-air ryad.