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Médéric Turay (born 1979 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast) is a leading contemporary Ivorian artist currently living and working in Marrakech, Morocco. Represented by OOA Gallery, he has developed a powerful and distinctive pictorial practice over the past two decades, positioned at the intersection of African intellectual traditions, modern art history, and a resolutely contemporary visual language.
Trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts (INSAAC) in Abidjan following an early background in applied arts, Médéric Turay has built an international artistic trajectory shaped by constant movement between Africa, Europe, and the Arab world. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions and major contemporary art fairs worldwide, and his paintings are now held in significant private and institutional collections.
Turay’s practice unfolds within a profoundly nomadic dynamic—geographical, cultural, and conceptual. Often associated with neo-expressionism, his work transcends stylistic categorization. For Turay, gesture functions as memory, mark as trace, and the painted surface as a site of tension between ancestral heritage and contemporary realities. The deliberately ambiguous forms that inhabit his compositions resist fixed identities, favoring archetypes that speak to shared origins and collective memory.
Materiality plays a central role in his work. Paintings, collages, and relief-like surfaces are constructed through the layering of pigments, sand, coffee, natural materials, and mixed media, giving the works an almost sculptural presence. Earth-toned palettes—wood, ochre, stone—are punctuated by vivid hues of yellow, blue, green, and red, evoking both primordial landscapes and a deeply embodied, organic energy.
Recurring human and animal figures—intentionally ungendered—emerge throughout Turay’s oeuvre. Often positioned in the foreground, these silhouettes appear suspended in states of transformation, restraint, or resistance. Faces are suggested but never fully revealed, establishing a deliberate tension between recognition and opacity. This refusal of clarity questions visibility, otherness, and the limits of perception, while opening the work to universal interpretation.
At the core of Médéric Turay’s artistic research lies a fundamental principle: “Resist to exist.” This leitmotif runs through his entire body of work, understood not as confrontation alone, but as survival, transmission, and remembrance. His paintings operate as contemporary totems—spaces where ancestral references, modern anxieties, and future possibilities coexist.
Through this layered and uncompromising practice, Médéric Turay asserts himself as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary African art. His work offers collectors artworks of strong identity and lasting relevance, defined by both material intensity and profound symbolic depth.
