RAN AWAY Nour-Eddine Jarram 04 January - 02 february 2025

In the exhibition Ran Away, Nour-Eddine Jarram shows new works about migrants and refugees, but also a series of watercolours of the meadows and woods of the surroundings of his studio in Usselo near Enschede NL. They are complemented by works that are based on 17th century painters such as Frans Hals and Michaelina Woutier. The embedment in Dutch culture, in which Nour-Eddine Jarram has found his place, thus becomes manifest.

Nour-Eddine Jarram feels a strong involvement in the fate of migrants and refugees. At the beginning of the refugee crisis he decided to take up the subject and started a series of watercolours that he continues to this day. As a Moroccan newcomer in Enschede, The Netherlands in the early 1970s, he knows the difficult path of the migrant who has to find a place in Western society. In his early paintings and drawings he mixed Moroccan motifs and patterns with the work of Dutch masters such as Rembrandt, whom he has admired from an early age.

These were followed by paintings and pastel drawings of semi-abstract landscapes in saturated colors in which human figures appear. These works have a mysterious, sometimes fairytale-like atmosphere in which the viewer can wander off. In the subsequent pastels, based on landscapes a. o. by Jacob van Ruysdael and Jan van Goyen, he introduces a calligraphic figure running around the scenery. It is made up of Arabic letters, a kind of avatar or alter ego of the artist who explores the world of the 17th century Dutch masters.

In the current migrants and refugees series, Nour-Eddine Jarram processes the intense images from the media of boat refugees and asylants, but also selfies of young immigrants as they present themselves on social media. In 2021, the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam purchased his series Moroccan Youngsters which consists of 114 watercolours of Moroccan youths who pose self-consciously or on the other hand are subdued and lost in thought.

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