Now:
Ran Away
Nour-Eddine Jarram
watercolours, paintings
04-02 through 02-02-2025
vernissage Saturday 4 January 16:00 hours
Nour-Eddine Jarram (1954) 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, whose work 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 2022, 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.
In the exhibition Ran Away, Jarram shows new works about migrants and refugees, but also a series of watercolours of the meadows and woods in the vicinity of his studio in Usselo near Enschede NL. Other works are based on 17th century painters such as Frans Hals and Michaelina Woutier. Thus the embedment in Dutch culture, in which Nour-Eddine Jarram has found his place, is manifest.
Also see the reportage on Dutch television about Nour-Eddine Jarram at the Rijksmuseum talking about his Moroccan Youngsters watercolour series geheimen-van-het-museum (min. 08:08 t/m 11:58)