Fouad Belamine

Born in Fez in 1950 into a family of craftsmen, Fouad Bellamine discovered at an early age the light, colors, and traditional craftsmanship that would permanently influence his work. Trained at the School of Applied Arts in Casablanca starting in 1967, he belongs to the generation that extended the modernist research initiated by the Casablanca School, while asserting a more open and experimental stance.

As early as the 1970s, he developed an abstract practice fueled by debates surrounding cultural identity, minimalism, and international avant-gardes. Rejecting any folkloric interpretation of Moroccan art, he built a personal visual language based on light, space, and the monumentality of gesture. Both a painter and theorist, he explored the canvas as well as architectural space through immersive installations where horizontality, repetition, and seriality played a central role.

Settling in Paris in the 1980s, he participated in the Paris Biennale in 1982 and pursued research around the "figural," bridging abstraction, spirituality, and the memory of Moroccan architecture. His Arches and Marabouts series rank among the major milestones of contemporary Moroccan painting.

In 2020, the Mohammed VI Museum in Rabat hosted "Entrée en matière" (Introduction to Material/Subject Matter), an exhibition retracing 50 years of the artist's painting—the first retrospective ever dedicated to a living Moroccan artist.