Casablanca – Moroccan visual artist Mustapha Boujemaoui recently wrapped up his “Œuvres choisies” exhibition, which ran at Casablanca’s American Arts Center from October 13 to November 10.
Curated by Youssef Bennani and presented by Loft Art Gallery, the exhibition offered an opportunity to revisit a career spanning more than five decades, through works that explore the relationship between form, matter, and transparency.
The tea glass at the heart of his art
One object appears again and again throughout Boujemaoui’s work: the traditional Moroccan tea glass. Something so familiar in everyday life becomes a starting point for endless artistic exploration.
Rather than simply reproducing the object, Boujemaoui plays with its shape, repetition, and transparency. He layers and fragments its image, experiments with light, and uses it to explore the space between abstraction and memory. At certain stages of his career, he even incorporated actual tea leaves into his paintings, bringing the material itself into the artwork.
This recurring motif gives his work a recognizable visual language, while allowing each composition to take a different direction. The exhibition’s selection offered visitors an opportunity to see how his treatment of the same everyday object has evolved over the years.
A monograph to document his artistic journey
Boujemaoui’s story will soon receive another form of documentation. Following “Œuvres choisies,” Art Korner Gallery founder Youssef Bennani says he is preparing a monograph dedicated to the artist, bringing together archival material, personal accounts, and reproductions of works held in private and institutional collections.
The publication aims to document Boujemaoui’s career and the different stages of an artistic practice that has continued to return to familiar forms while finding new ways to explore them.
A career shaped by experimentation
Boujemaoui’s artistic journey began with studies at the fine arts schools of Tetouan, Brussels, and Paris, followed by studies at the Sorbonne. His work developed alongside the modernist movement associated with Moroccan artists Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi, and Mohamed Chebaa, while maintaining its own distinct direction.
Pauline de Mazières and Sylvia Belhassan first discovered and supported his work in 1982, introducing it through solo and group exhibitions at L’Atelier gallery in Rabat and abroad.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Boujemaoui took part in exhibitions across France, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Brazil, and Greece. His career also earned international recognition, including a special mention from the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts in 1995 and the jury prize at the third Sharjah International Biennial in 1997.
His later exhibitions continued to explore the possibilities of painting and installation. In 2003, the Musée de Marrakech hosted “Ataï,” featuring his paintings and installations.
Five years later, he presented “Les verres de ma vie” at Rabat’s Bab Rouah National Gallery. More recently, Casablanca’s Villa Carl Fick Museum devoted a retrospective, “La Poétique des formes,” to his work in 2026.
Ultimately, Boujemaoui’s work shows how a familiar everyday object can become an endless source of artistic exploration. Across decades of painting and installation, he has continued to revisit the tea glass, finding new ways to experiment with its form, transparency, and meaning.