Mederic Turay

Médéric Turay: Ivorian Contemporary Painting, Totems and the Memory of Resistance

Médéric Turay is an Ivorian contemporary artist born in 1979 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and currently living and working in Marrakech, Morocco. Working across painting, collage, mixed media and sculptural surfaces, he creates layered compositions where human figures, animal presences, signs and symbolic forms emerge as contemporary totems.

His practice occupies a significant place within contemporary African art, bringing together African intellectual traditions, nomadic experience, ancestral memory and a contemporary language of gesture and material intensity. For Turay, the painted surface is not only an image. It is a field of resistance, transmission and transformation.

View available works by Médéric Turay ›

Gesture, Trace and Ancestral Memory

Médéric Turay’s paintings are built from marks, traces and layered signs. Forms appear, dissolve and reappear across the surface, creating images that feel both ancient and urgent. His figures are often deliberately ambiguous, resisting fixed identity and opening instead onto archetypes, spirits, masks, bodies and presences in transformation.

This refusal of simple readability is central to the work. Faces may be suggested without being fully revealed; bodies may appear suspended, restrained or in motion. Through these partial forms, Turay questions visibility, otherness and the limits of recognition, while allowing memory to remain active and unresolved.

Material Surfaces and Organic Energy

Materiality plays a decisive role in Turay’s practice. His works bring together pigments, acrylic, oil, collage, sand, coffee, walnut ink, burlap and other natural or found materials. These elements give the paintings a physical density, often close to relief, where the surface becomes almost sculptural.

Earth tones, ochres, blacks and mineral greys are often interrupted by vivid reds, blues, yellows and greens. This contrast gives the works their particular tension: between the organic and the urban, the ancestral and the contemporary, the buried trace and the sudden sign. Colour appears as energy, but also as rupture.

Contemporary Totems and the Principle of Resistance

At the heart of Médéric Turay’s work lies the phrase “Resist to exist.” This principle does not refer only to confrontation. It also suggests survival, memory, endurance and the necessity of remaining visible in a world that often erases origins, bodies and stories.

His paintings and painted objects can be understood as contemporary totems. They gather fragments of ancestral reference, present anxiety and future possibility. Human and animal figures appear as guardians, witnesses or messengers, carrying a symbolic force that exceeds narrative explanation.

From Abidjan to Marrakech: A Nomadic Visual Language

Trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts at INSAAC in Abidjan after an early education in applied arts, Médéric Turay has developed an international career shaped by movement across Africa, Europe and the Arab world. This nomadic trajectory is not only biographical. It is embedded in the structure of his work.

His paintings bring together multiple geographies, visual memories and cultural references without reducing them to a single origin. They speak from Ivory Coast and from Marrakech, from ancestral imagination and contemporary experience, from personal history and collective memory.

Selected Exhibitions, Art Fairs and Collections

Médéric Turay’s solo exhibitions include The Talking Totems at Khalid Fine Arts, Marrakech; Eidos at Rarares Gallery, Dubai; Visions Unveiled at Triumph Gallery, Moscow; Sing Me a Story at Fondation Donwahi, Abidjan; Inspirational Dreams at OOA Gallery; Atlas of a Shaman Aedo at Giovanni Bonelli, Milan; Itinerary of a Story Teller at Galerie des Bains, Geneva; African Dandy at OOA Gallery; African Dreamer at Galerie 38, Casablanca; Traces of Humanity at OOA Gallery; and earlier solo presentations in Abidjan, Dakar, Cergy-Pontoise and Tangier.

His work has also been shown in group exhibitions including Côte d’Ivoire: Memories and Dreams of a Destiny at OOA Gallery; Nostalgie du Futur at Lis10 Gallery, Dakar; The Eighth Continent at Windsor Gallery, Lagos; Topologies du Bonheur at Le Mikado, Annecy; Africa Rises in Fall at OOA Gallery; West Bund Art Fair with Bloom Galerie and HDM Gallery in Beijing; Prête-moi ton Rêve in Abidjan; Vision Art Festival in Crans-Montana; Murcia Street Art Project; and Africa Plural at OOA Gallery.

Turay has participated in major art fairs and projects including Investec Cape Town Art Fair with OOA Gallery, Dubai Art Week, Modern Art Fair Paris, Art Central Hong Kong, Volta New York with OOA Gallery, Art Madrid with OOA Gallery, Art Miami, Urban Art Fair Paris, Verona Art Fair, ARTX Lagos with OOA Gallery, AKAA Paris and the Marrakech Biennale. His work is held in selected private and institutional collections including Charles Saatchi, Ethan Cohen, the Mohamed VI Museum, Fondation Donwahi, Fondation Banque Populaire, the Niarchos Collection and other international collections.

Available Works

Explore a selection of available works by Médéric Turay at OOA Gallery, including mixed-media paintings and sculptural surfaces that explore memory, resistance, ancestral traces, contemporary totems, material intensity and symbolic transformation.