Hassan Hajjaj valuation
Photographs Moroccan life in a pop register, and frames the prints in tins and bottle crates.
Hassan Hajjaj was born in Larache in 1961 and moved to London as a child, and the work draws on both places at once: studio portraits of Moroccan bikers, musicians and street traders, posed with the formality of fashion photography and dressed in clothes he makes himself from counterfeit-branded and traditional fabrics.
What a work by Hassan Hajjaj is worth
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Bio
Hassan Hajjaj was born in Larache in 1961 and moved to London as a child, and the work draws on both places at once: studio portraits of Moroccan bikers, musicians and street traders, posed with the formality of fashion photography and dressed in clothes he makes himself from counterfeit-branded and traditional fabrics. The Kesh Angels series of veiled women on motorcycles is the best known. He has been called a North African Warhol, which catches the pop sensibility and misses the specificity.
The frames are part of the work and this is the fact that most often trips up a valuation: prints are presented in handmade surrounds of tins, bottles, packaging and found product, and a work separated from its frame is not the same object. Edition size, print date and whether the original frame survives all have to be established. He also makes furniture and objects. Condition covers both the photographic print and the assembled frame, which ages quite differently.
Kesh Angels, La Caravane and the Jameel Prize
Hajjaj lives and works between London and Marrakesh. Kesh Angels, of 2010, shows five veiled women from Marrakesh on motorbikes in front of the city's Theatre Royal, and his first feature-length film, Karima: A Day in the Life of a Henna Girl, set in the same world, premiered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015.
He was shortlisted for the Victoria and Albert Museum's Jameel Prize in 2009 and won the Sovereign Middle East and African Art Prize in 2011. My Rock Stars was shown at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 2016 and La Caravane at Somerset House in London in 2017, and he photographed Billie Eilish for the cover of Vogue in March 2020.
Andy Wahloo, My Maroc Stars and the books
Hajjaj taught himself photography. His clothing label, Andy Wahloo, supplies much of what his sitters wear, setting camouflage, polka dots and animal prints against fabrics from the souk, and he mixes luxury brands with obvious fakes. In Kesh Angels the women wear heart-shaped sunglasses and striped socks, and the border repeats red food cans upside down. For the Vogue shoot in 2020 Billie Eilish wore Andy Wahloo, including a blazer made from the flag of the Casablanca football club Wydad AC.
My Maroc Stars pays tribute to Moroccan artists, singers and designers, among them Hindi Zahra, Dizzy DROS and Yassine Morabite. Karima was screened at Art Basel in June 2015, and La Caravane at Somerset House was his first solo show in London for seven years. Rose Issa Projects published the monograph By Hassan Hajjaj, edited by Katia Hadidian, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris published a book on him in 2019. His work has been shown at the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
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