Born in 1940 in Tunis, Sadok Gmach embarked on an artistic adventure from a young age that he lived throughout his life. In 1964, he participated in the formation of the Group of Six, then the Group of 11 and the Group 70. By joining forces, the artists of these groups announced Tunisian contemporaneity. By breaking with narrative and folkloric approaches, they developed a vision that renewed figuration and anchored abstraction in architecture and lettrism.
During his stay in Paris and then Berlin, Sadok Gmach sought to break away from his Tunisian
pictorial discourse and anchor himself in a universal language that led him to pop art.
Upon his return to Tunis in the early 1970s, he became close to Zoubeir Turki and Ammar Faraht and developed an artistic practise rooted in Islamic miniatures. his paintings, marked the use of flat tints and integration of calligraphic texts, recalling the way Arab artists of the 70s sought to establish a contemporary artistic language that distinguished them from what was being done in the West.
Gmach`s pictorial and iconographic universe is rooted in the present while also reflecting his childhood in the Medina and his rural origins.
Through a resolutely metaphysical approach, several themes recur over the years: The constantly reinvented women`s, sometimes solitary, sometimes grandmothers or protective mothers. Family is also an important subject to the artist. Often united, leaning against one another, its members seems inseparable.
Gmach`s figures appear, anonymous, in a imaginary territories or in the void. During meditation, they question the meaning of humanity and life.