Hédi Selmi

Hédi Selmi , born the March 22nd 1934 with Bab Jedid (Tunis) and deceased with an unknown date, is a sculptor Tunisia N.

After primary studies with the appendix of the Alaoui college, it continues its secondary studies until the third year in the same college as it leaves in 1950 for the School of the fine arts of Tunis. At the school where the European pupils are still most numerous, Selmi works the Dessin with Henri Saada. Even if the students have, at one time or another, the occasion to pass by the pattern shop, very few are those among them (especially Europeans) which choose the sculpture in speciality. At the time, the example of Selmi, among Moslem Tunisian, is single. After obtaining its diploma in 1954, with a price of drawing and sculpture which is worth a to him Grant, its choice is made: it will continue its training of sculptor with Paris.

4 years of studies to the Académie of the Art schools of Paris must complete its training of sculptor. He works the size of the stone, initially in the Yenses workshop then in the Adam workshop, and he initiates himself with the size of wood in the Collamarini workshop. At the end of these studies, in 1958, it obtains a first price of sculpture to the exposure organized by the Academy. Of return to Tunis, he teaches during 6 years the drawing with the Khaznadar college of the Bardo until in 1964. Selmi cultivates its taste for the Pédagogie by prodigant its councils with the most talented young people and while encouraging of its pupils to expose their work at the end of each year.

Parallel to artistic teaching, Hédi Selmi is devoted to an intense creative activity. Married in 1959 with Rosemarie Heide, professor of German, it works in its first workshop of the Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis. To this time the Buste S go back from the union leaders Mohammed Ali El Hammi and Farhat Hached which is ordered to him by the State. The same year, it temporarily installs its workshop in the paternal house with Sidi Rezig (in the southern suburbs of Tunis) where it carries out a fresco commemorative of the bloody events of Sakiet Sidi Youssef. But Selmi does not carry out that orders, it finds time to be delivered in the search of a personal expression. In 1958, it assembles a first exposure to the Gallery of arts, street Ibn Khaldoun, then a second in 1961 with the same gallery. The production of this first period is marked by a conservatism doubly imposed by the authors of the official orders, of which the sights are opened little with the innovations, and by the didactic concern of the sculptor which attaches an particular importance to the accessibility of work to the public, concern of which it is not separated any more in spite of his later evolution towards more innovative designs.

As of the accession of Tunisia to independence, he sees himself entrusting the role of official sculptor whom he ensures during nearly 3 decades by carrying out the majority of the government orders as regards official statuary and Monument S. Its achievements make integral part of the Tunisian cultural landscape now: national monuments, urban work of embellishment and interior decoration and works of varied inspiration and various invoices appearing in the public collections and deprived.

On the plan of the style, he embraces a rather broad range of esthetic choices: figurative manner for the statuary of the official monuments or stylized forms of an elliptic expression even abstract than it borrows at the successive times of the evolution of the sculpture of the 20th century. Its work also covers a wide range of inspirations and topics: romantic dramatization, Asceticism and contemplative examination, fascination by the Modernity or, on the contrary, denunciation of the threats which makes weigh the technological era on the Humanité and periodic abandonment with a militant compassion with the sufferings of the man in whom is read in filigree the memory of Alberto Giacometti or of Germaine Richier.

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