Born in France in 1953 in Decazeville (Aveyron) to parents of Berber origin. Graduated from the École supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris in 1974, he first practiced painting before turning to sculpture. With his numerous monumental achievements, Rachid Khimoune, who has exhibited since 1975, is represented in several museums, public and private collections in France and abroad. “Happy who, like Rachid K, was able, through his birth, to draw on two heritages: that of his native country, France, where since Greco-Roman origins artists have tried to wrest their secrets from the forms of nature and men to equal the gods; and the heritage of his ancestors, skilled in tracing pure lines of Arabic calligraphy, and learned, since the Middle Ages, in melting and transmuting the rarest metals in their earthen crucibles.(…) All that deposited the great geological eras, sand, stones and ores, all the slag of industrial civilization, pipes, beams, machine parts, carburetors, everything that made up the structure or decor of cities, road plates, paving stones , bitumen, grids, agglomerate with plastic resin under the soldering iron and the trowel of a 20th century artist to create something radically new: petrified forms, plants, animals, humanoids, whose massive presence comes from ‘inscribe in our present. A very concrete inscription, deep like a wound, often violent, with always, however, as incompleteness, an uncertainty: the forms and characters of Rachid K seem to operate a slow rise from the depths, a long journey through thick layers of ‘oversight. This is because the present, our present, is itself the time for all questions. Those that come from the past, those that obscure the future. Diverting our daily life, the elements and the decor of our modern times, is not, for Rachid K, stopping at the effect of surprise and derision, or even at the pure plastic effect, which would be another observation of the checkmate of modern art. Even with cement and manhole covers, we can form a circle of “children of the world” and dream of installing similar ones in France or China: dreaming makes you dream of the future. And hope.” François Maspero “Seeing what we no longer see, looking differently, in magic and dreams” he says, this is what makes all the poetry of his work. From the manhole cover, to the old power outlet, through salvaged objects, Rachid gives relief and life to the insignificant. The universe of Rachid Khimoune: an imaginary world populated by real or invented animals composed of a jumble of objects that populate our daily lives, his “Bestiary” as he calls it, is today internationally recognized by critics. “Les Enfants du Monde”, sculptures installed in Paris in 2001, is one of Rachid Khimoune’s major works. To create them, the artist went to several major cities around the world to take the “skin of the streets”. “One might believe that all the asphalt in the world looks the same, and yet from one city to another, tree grates and manhole covers are distinctive signs like a tattoo on the skin which reveals identity. of the city, even its history. I would have cast the words, Water – Gas – Sanitation – Electricity, in all the languages of the world.”
