Safi – Up close, Abdelghafour El Maftouhi’s portraits read as a tangle of crossed and tightened wire. Step back, and the face of a football legend comes into view.
The Moroccan visual artist works in a technique called wire art, and he has brought it to Amsterdam. His exhibition “Arts et football : le jeu comme toile” (Arts and Football: The Game as a Canvas) opened this week at the city’s municipal library and runs until July 3.
Organized by the Tamuda Foundation for Art and Culture, the show gathers around ten portraits. Each one is built through patient crossing, tension and layering of thread, with the sport itself serving as the canvas.
His subjects span generations. Earlier greats such as Mustapha El Haddaoui, Badou Zaki and Mohamed Timoumi share the walls with today’s Hakim Ziyech, Yassine Bounou and Sofyan Amrabat, the players who helped carry Morocco to the semifinals of the 2022 World Cup.
Among them hangs one Dutch great, Johan Cruyff, the face of Total Football and one of the sport’s defining figures.
The foundation extended the initiative to the Netherlands after the Rabat edition drew a strong response.
The result is a room where sport feeds art, and where a footballer’s features emerge from nothing but taut lengths of thread.
