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Jaber French painting Art Naif Outsider art signed

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12.5X9 inches acrylic and gouache on paper. titled "Boner 2002" Jaber (French, b. 1938)

Jaber was born in 1938 in M'saken, Tunisia. Orphaned at the age of three, he was raised by his big sister. He went to school until the age of eight, then became a baker's apprentice. As a teenager he used to draw with charcoal on the walls of the bakery and recalls the images of birds, flowers and fish that he used to make with bread dough.

He worked in Sousse, Tunisia at first, and in 1956 moved to Saint-Laurent-du-Var and later Cagnes-sur-Mer (Riviera), France. In 1958 he moved to Paris and became a boxer. He then became a street actor and singer, earning the nickname "monarch of beaubourg."

After his first exhibition in the gardens of the Place des Vosges, in Paris, he went to New Jersey and married an American girl he had met in Paris. The marriage ended in divorce after two years, but while he was in the U.S. he won his first art award at the Plainfield Annual Festival of Art for a work called "the happy idiot." From 1976 to 1979 he traveled to several other countries including Canada, Morocco, and Egypt.

Jaber creates images of extraordinary life-force. His vigorous drawings and vivid colors make them easily recognizable. For twenty years he has been painting and exhibiting his works all over the world, including Spain, Canada, Tunisia, Switzerland, the United states and France.

The extravagant Monsieur Jaber
by Joe Ryczko, editor of the French revue "Les friches de l'art
I never had the occasion to meet Jaber in Beaubourg's square. But they say that he has haunted the place for years, hawking his drawings to passersby. However, during my wanderings in the quarter, I would see his works in shops on the rue Nicolas Flamel,the rue St-Martin or the passage Molière. Jaber lived in the Marais but it is not widely known. In short, Jaber the musician, the tumbler, the acrobat, the incredible, frequented on a daily basis this corner of Paris where one may, in one way or another,follow his tracks, he, the elusive one!
Jaber al Mahjoub, a street artist, originally from Tunisia and now living in Paris, France. Encouraged at an early age by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, Jaber calls himself the "Happy Idiot," obsessively making paintings, sculptures and songs that express the immediacy of life and experience. Art Brut. art naif outsider art. naive art. folk art.

unframed

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