Mohamed Melehi was a leading figure in Arab abstract art and one of the original founders of the Casablanca Art School (together with Farid Belkahia and Mohamed Chabaa) an avant-garde group that radically questioned cosmopolitan abstraction and art pedagogy within the context of colonial powers and influences.
His work resists the East/West divide resulting in a dialogue between Moroccan traditional and popular craft, whilst also connecting to the Hard Edge painters of the 1960s.
Following his primary studies in Tetouan, Melehi studied from 1955 in Seville and Madrid, and from 1957 in Rome where he would also become the first African-Arab artist to exhibit his work in the avant-garde gallery Topazia Alliata, which would later recommend him to museum minds such as Lawrence Alloway. Melehi’s journey in transnational abstraction earned him an assistant professor position at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 1962. He then moved to New York and was included in the 1963 Hard Edge and Geometric Painting of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He returned to Morocco in 1964 when Farid Belkahia appointed him as a professor to teach painting, sculpture, collage and photography at the Casablanca Art School. He joined the core group of artists—Ataallah, Belkahia, Chabâa, Hafid and Hamidi—to set up the most radical postcolonial arts platform with the inauguration of the street/manifesto exhibition Présence Plastique in 1969. Melehi co-founded the journal Integral (1971–1978) and the Asilah Arts Festival.
A painter, graphic designer, teacher, muralist, and cultural activist, Melehi is a pivotal and leading figure for postcolonial Moroccan art and within the history of transnational modernism. In his paintings we sense the spirit of aesthetic revolution and the exhilaration of post-Independence Morocco.