Fez — Loft Art Gallery is presenting until March 2026 “La peinture à l’exercice de l’art” (Painting in the Practice of Art), a two-part group exhibition that explores how painting is being redefined within contemporary artistic practice.
Curated by Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, the exhibition unfolds between the gallery’s spaces in Marrakech and Casablanca, proposing a critical reflection on the evolving status of the pictorial medium.
Opened on December 27, 2025 at Loft Art Gallery Marrakech, the first chapter examines what painting becomes when it frees itself from traditional frames. Long viewed as a frontal and autonomous medium, painting here expands into space, volume, and time, challenging inherited definitions.
Painting as an expanded field
The exhibition draws on Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa’s research on the notion of the “expanded field” of painting. Works presented move fluidly between painting, installation, sculpture, photography, and moving image. The canvas is no longer treated as an endpoint, but as a starting point from which pigment, gesture, and image migrate into three-dimensional and spatial forms.
This approach allows painting to be understood as an operation rather than a fixed medium. Color occupies volume, gestures unfold in space, and the viewer’s presence becomes an active component of the work. The exhibition thus highlights painting as a living process, open to hybridization and transformation.
Dialogue between image, matter, and space
By bringing together diverse artistic practices, “La peinture à l’exercice de l’art” emphasizes new relationships between image, materiality, space, and temporality. The works resist strict categorization and instead invite viewers to reconsider how painting functions within contemporary visual culture.
Rather than abandoning painting, the artists push it to its limits. The pictorial act absorbs other disciplines, confronting installation strategies and sculptural presence while maintaining a dialogue with its own history.
A second chapter aligned with the international art calendar
The second chapter of “La peinture à l’exercice de l’art”, scheduled for February 2026, will coincide with the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. This phase will extend the inquiry by focusing on the transition from frontal painting to sculptural and installative forms.
It will examine how contemporary artists rethink the presence of painting in space and its relationship with the viewer’s body. This timing situates the exhibition within a broader international conversation on African and diasporic contemporary art.
Artists and curatorial vision
The exhibition features works by Walid Ardhaoui, Nassim Azarzar, Mustapha Azeroual, Amina Benbouchta, Khadija El Abyad, Radia Lamrani, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, and Amina Rezki. Together, their practices reveal the growing interconnection between painting and the intermedia landscape of contemporary art.
For Yasmine Berrada, co-founder of Loft Art Gallery, the exhibition reflects the gallery’s mission to accompany the evolution of contemporary Arab and African art on the international scene. She notes that the project highlights painting as a living language, capable of absorbing gesture, space, material, and time.
With “La peinture à l’exercice de l’art”, Loft Art Gallery offers a rigorous and timely reading of contemporary painting. The exhibition presents painting not as a closed tradition, but as an open field in constant redefinition, deeply engaged with the realities of contemporary artistic production.
