Mustapha Boujemaoui : la poétique des formes

Mustapha Boujemaoui: la poétique des formes brings together about fifty years of work by the Moroccan artist. The works use mixed techniques, among them painting, collage and printmaking, on canvas, wood and paper. The Fondation Nationale des Musées presents the solo exhibition at Villa Carl Ficke, Musée de la Mémoire de Casablanca. It runs from 10 June to 30 November 2026.

The Moroccan tea glass, paired with the teapot, is the motif that runs through the selection. His pictures rest on two principles, transparency and repetition. In some works he paints tea leaves onto the surface, or glues them in place, to shape the outline of a glass. Le Verre de Marie, from 1991, goes further: a real tea glass sits on a glass support near the top of the canvas. The organisers connect the motif to hospitality, conviviality, collective memory and the ways Moroccan society has changed.

The selection also reaches back to the 1970s. Pictocollage, from 1975, is a mixed-media work on canvas. In the same decade the artist made what he calls pictocollages on paper or newspaper. Les jardins imaginaires dates from 1988. Two caravan paintings from 1994 are credited to the Académie du Royaume du Maroc, on deposit at the Musée Mohammed VI d'Art Moderne et Contemporain. One of them, La Caravane n°3 Hommage à Ibn Battouta, is painted in acrylic on newspaper mounted on canvas. A canvas from 2020 takes up the figure of Al-Boraq. Most of the works are lent by the collector Youssef Bennani. According to Le360, it is Boujemaoui's first solo show in more than ten years.

Boujemaoui comes from Ahfir, in Oujda province, where he was born in 1952; he lives and works in Rabat. He trained in Tétouan, Brussels and Paris, and holds a DEA in visual arts from Université Paris 1. He calls himself a peintre-chercheur, or painter-researcher. The museum is open from 10am to 6pm every day except Tuesday.