A prominent modernist artist in North Africa, Ahmed Cherkaoui drew on a spectrum of signs and shapes derived from the folk art and national heritage of Morocco. The calligraphy he learned at Quranic school and his mother’s traditional Amazigh tattoos that he encountered at a young age both formed part of his visual language, while later he was influenced by artists including Roger Bissière and Paul Klee, and the Art Informel movement. After studying graphics at the École des Metiers d’Art de Paris from 1956 to 1959, Cherkaoui spent a year at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1961 and held his first solo show in Paris at the Atelier de Lucienne Thalheimer. Using a range of materials that included surfaces such as burlap, Cherkaoui’s attention to tactility, colour, line and shape hint at the essential elements of different sign systems. Numerous retrospective exhibitions have been organised, including at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 1996 and regularly at the Salon de Mai in Paris.