Fouad Belamine

Fouad Bellamine – Untitled, 1972

Born in Fez in 1950 into a family of artisans, Fouad Bellamine discovered at an early age the light, colors, and traditional skills that would leave a lasting impression on his work. Trained at the École des Arts Appliqués 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.

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

Living in Paris during 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 are among the major milestones of contemporary Moroccan painting.

In 2020, the Mohammed VI Museum in Rabat hosted "Entrée en matière" (Introduction to Matter), an exhibition tracing 50 years of painting by the artist Fouad Bellamine—the first retrospective ever dedicated to a living Moroccan artist.