Mustapha Boujemaoui

Mustapha Boujemaoui is a Moroccan artist who lives and works in Rabat. He was born in Ahfir, in Oujda province, in 1952. He paints and makes collages on canvas, wood, paper and newspaper, and has also worked in installation and video. The Moroccan tea glass is his recurring subject. He describes himself as a peintre-chercheur, or painter-researcher.

Transparency and repetition are the two concepts behind the work. In the series Les verres de ma vie, tea leaves painted or glued to the surface form the outline of a glass. In Les métamorphoses de ma vie, shown in 2008, the glass becomes a whirlwind, a chair, lips or a human body. His earliest subjects were travel, displacement and the passage of time. In the 1970s he made pictocollages on paper or newspaper, and titled a 1989 solo show Picto journal.

He studied in Tétouan from 1969 to 1972, then in Brussels and Paris, and holds a DEA in visual arts from Université Paris 1. From 1988 he taught in Rabat. Solo shows include Les verres de ma vie at Galerie Nationale Bab Rouah, Rabat, in 2008 and Passages at L'Atelier 21, Casablanca, in 2015. He showed in the Moroccan pavilion of the Cairo Biennale in 1993 and 1997. The Musée Mohammed VI d'Art Moderne et Contemporain holds his work.