Chaibia Talal, Mon Village (My Village), 1990, Acrylic on Canvas, 190 x 191 cm.

Chabia Talal is a self taught Moroccan artist known for her distinctive deeply expressive paintings characterized as naive or outsider art, illustrating extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds. She’s mostly known for her bright colors, usually unmixed large gestural brushstrokes, innocent and dreamlike. Born in 1929 in the small village of Chtouka in Morocco, she was only 13 when she was married off to a much older man in his seventies. A year later she became a mother and the year after widowed at the age of 15. For the next 10 years she worked as a maid to help support her son, and was known as mahboula— the foolish one, for her dreamy nature. It wasn’t until she was 25 when she took up painting on her own, but didn’t receive much recognition both locally in Morocco and internationally from the art world until 1966.