Mohamed Nabili

Mohamed Nabili was a Moroccan painter, ceramicist and graphic designer, born in Benslimane, who died there in 2012. His favoured material was Saharan sand, shaped and hollowed, incised with signs and tifinagh letters and worked with bright pigment. The 2026 exhibition poster shows an untitled work in mixed media on wood.

The work turns on trace, sign, memory, composition and colour, with forms taken from popular arts and calligraphy. Tattoo patterns, wall decoration and carpet designs recur. Nabili described the desert as a philosophy, the philosophy of the essential. Auction listings include Composition bleue, 1987, and Sans titre, 1989.

Nabili trained at the École des arts appliqués in Casablanca in 1973. In 1974 he moved to France to study at the École d'art et d'architecture de Marseille. He lived or travelled in Brittany, Denmark, Peru, Mexico and the United States before settling back in his home region in the early 1990s. His foundation for children, Imaginaire de l'enfant dans les arts plastiques, was set up in 2005. Its work has included art activities and murals painted with children at the university hospitals of Rabat and Marrakech. In 2026 the Fondation Nationale des Musées and Marsam Art Gallery presented Nabili : La Mémoire des Signes. It opened at Jamaâ El-Fna, Musée du Patrimoine Immatériel in Marrakech.