Mohamed Hamidi

Born on August 7, 1941 in Casablanca, Mohamed Hamidi studied at the Casablanca School of Fine Arts before leaving for France to continue his training at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the École des métiers d'art in Paris, where he earned a diploma in monumental art in 1964. Back in Morocco, he taught at the Casablanca School of Fine Arts from 1967 to 1975 and took part in the 1969 manifesto exhibition on Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech alongside Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Chebaa and Mohamed Melehi. His painting is recognizable for its warm, joyful palette, dominated by orange and red, carried by carnal and sensory themes. A founding member of the Moroccan Association of Plastic Arts, he was one of the pillars of the Casablanca School, the movement that transformed Moroccan visual arts in the 1960s. In 2005, he initiated a project bringing together some twenty painters to cover the Azemmour medina in murals, and has since divided his time between Azemmour, Casablanca and Grasse, France. Since 1958, he exhibited regularly in Morocco and abroad; in 2011, La Galerie 38 devoted a retrospective to him in Casablanca, and his work was shown in 2022 at the Fondation Pernod-Ricard in Paris, in the exhibition "Histoire d'abstraction: le cauchemar de Greenberg." In 2019, two of his works, Harmonie (1971) and Marie (1972), entered the collections of the Centre Pompidou. He passed away in 2025.

An abstraction inhabited by color and matter, carrying forward the collective gesture of the Casablanca School.