Born 1983. Tunis, Tunisia
Lives and works Tunis, Tunisia
Aymen Mbarki is a self-taught visual artist whose heightened awareness and sensibility to the poetics and politics of language and mythologies infuse his practice. His graphically minimal compositions and painterly outlines straddle across figurative, theatrical and asemic abstractions and capture the essence of spontaneous and intimate human gesture. As early as the age of 5, when Mbarki came across small posters of a printed copy of the work “Saturn Devouring his Son” by the Spanish painter and engraver Goya, a curious shift occurred whereby this encounter strongly and radically marked him and influenced his approach to art.
Mbarki’s work proposes a dialogue between material and movement, pattern and experimentation. His current solo exhibition entitled Sun Rays and Tiny Cubes unfolds an exploration of brushwork semblances and graphic lines that vacillate between tradition and modernity, amorphousness and lineation, where the viewer is ensconced in tranquil spaces for freedom and introspection.
Mbarki's work depicts scenes and creatures that hover between fantasy and reality; the black line is a unifying element of his work. Mbarki’s minimal approach and distinctive technique take impetus from poetry, literature, Greek mythology and theatrical tragedy.
His first exhibition took place in 2019 at the National Library of Tunis, since then he has taken part in several group exhibitions.