Myriame Dachraoui

9 July - 23 September 2025
  • About

    About

    Born 1994. , Tunisia 

    Lives and works between Tunis, Tunisia  and London, UK 

     

    Myriame Dachraoui is a painter trained as an architect. Her primary mediums are oil and digital painting.

    Dachraoui’s studio practice is based on her instinctive application of colour (notably a shadowy and blue palette), articulated in dreamlike scenes of buildings and abstract landscapes populated by her symbolic visual motifs (many drawn from the surrounding Mediterranean): from expansive valleys and protruding homes to Phoenician boats and playing cards in a seaside salon and women’s bodies. By applying her training in architecture, Dachraoui’s work takes a conscious, deeply personal look at how real spaces and structures can hold memories, unique colours and personalities, and how these attributes can manifest into new, sometimes surreal, forms on the canvas. She then asks the audience to consider the role spaces play in their own lives, applying universal themes of motherhood and cultural heritage through her visuals and motifs. The result is a series of works that are aesthetically striking and colourful while also having further allegorical layers on the power of the spaces we inhabit, should the spectator wish to engage in conversation with Dachraoui’s ideas.

     

    Recent exhibitions include an open studio at l’atelier Selma Feriani gallery in Tunis (2023), Boundless/Binding in Los Angeles (2024) and Levitate in Shoreditch, London (2024).

    Her work is sought out as part of numerous national and international collections, including Selma Feriani Gallery, Tunisia’s premier art institution, and by Touria El Glaoui, founder of the 1-54 art fair in London.

  • Shrouds (2025)

    In this new series Shrouds, Tunisian artist Myriame Dachraoui—originally trained as an architect—continues her exploration of space as a vestibule for memory. Growing up in a society where privacy was subject to constant scrutiny, the body, including her own, was both sheltered as much as it was confined by the domestic sphere. These contradictions dictated roles and imposed boundaries. “My body, my voice, and my gestures were shaped by a tacit surveillance by male family members, where intrusion and repression blurred under the guise of protection”, Dachraoui reflects.

     

    In her paintings, this surveillance is revealed, subverted, and upended through an explorationof the relationship between intimacy, power, and self-staging. Architecture becomes her lens, a tool to probe the tension between visibility and intrusion. These restaged scenes confront the viewer with deliberately vulnerable scenes. On her canvases, perspective and scale shift unexpectedly; they are playfully yet deliberately altered, inviting the audience to look where they’re not supposed to—transforming them into voyeurs. The works coax the viewer into interrogating a narrative that exposes the tensions of the gaze upon female bodies, the injunction and demand for modesty, and the ways in which private space is often traversed, controlled, or even confiscated by society—especially within a North African context, where cultural conflicts surrounding the exposure of the body and intimacy continue to unfold.

     

     

  • Dachraoui in l’atelier Selma Feriani in July 2025
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