M'hamed Issiakhem (in Kabyle: Mḥemmed Isyaxem), born June 17, 1928 in Taboudoucht in Algeria and died December 1, 1985 in Algiers, is an Algerian painter, representative of modern painting in Algeria. He spent his childhood in Relizane, it was there that in 1943, he handled a grenade, picked up in an American military camp, the explosion of which caused the death of two of his sisters and a nephew. After two years of hospitalization and several surgical operations, his left forearm was amputated.
At the end of the 1940s, M’hamed Issiakhem enrolled in the Society of Fine Arts of Algiers. Until 1951, the student of the miniaturist Omar Racim followed courses at the School of Fine Arts in Algiers before meeting Kateb Yacine. In Paris, where he met the author of Nedjma, M’hamed Issiakhem exhibited at the André-Maurice gallery and entered the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. A scholarship holder at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid in 1962, he preferred to return to Algeria - independent since July. Again in the company of Kateb Yacine, he joined the daily Alger republican where he spent two years as a cartoonist. Later a professor at the Fine Arts of Algiers and Oran, the artist held numerous exhibitions in Algeria and abroad before being awarded the first Golden Simba for painting, a distinction from the Unesco for Africa, presented to Rome in 1980. Kateb Yacine declared having "seen, more than once, finish a painting in a few hours, only to destroy it suddenly, and redo it again, as if his work also was a grenade that never finished exploding in his hands.”
M’hamed Issiakhem died on December 1, 1985 in Algiers, following a long illness. “In front of his painting,” writes the sociologist Benamar Mediene, “Issiakhem is the disconcerting, the paradoxical, the irreverent demiurge, who, in his prophetic lucidity swallows gunpowder and lights a cigarette. Art, for him, is always a risk which involves the very existence of the person who assumes it.”
Writer, activist and former editor-in-chief of the literary magazine La nouvelle critique, Jacques Arnaud was offered a painting by M'hamed Issiakhem, while they were working on a special issue devoted to Algerian literature. Entitled "Algeria 1960", the work was created in 1960. Having died in 2008, Jacques Arnaud wished to donate it to an Algerian museum and instructed the Art et Mémoire au Maghreb association to carry out his last wishes. The painting, which was first the subject of a restoration operation in Paris thanks to a sponsorship action, was presented, during a ceremony on January 8, 2017, to the National Museum of Fine Arts of Alger.
On the sidelines of the 25th anniversary of his death, M'hamed Issiakhem was dedicated to a vast tribute exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Algiers (Mama) which brought together more than a hundred paintings from public and private collections. For the 30th anniversary of his disappearance, on December 1, 1985, the wilaya of Relizane organized a tribute to M’hamed Issiakhem. Google will celebrate the 90th anniversary of the birth of M'hamed Issiakhem on June 17, 2018, with a Doodle visible on the search engine's home page.
