Nabil El Makhloufi - Nachtwege

We warmly invite you and your friends to join us for the opening with the artist on Friday, January 16th at 7 PM in our Frankfurt gallery.

Nabil El Makhloufi was born in 1973 in Fès. He attended the art school in Rabat, worked as an art teacher, and studied from 2001 to 2008 at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig. After completing his degree, Annette Schröter accepted him into her master class.

Since 2005, the artist has developed a synthesis of contemporary Moroccan art and the painting style of the Leipzig School. In 2010, he received his first recognition for this extraordinary path: at the Dak’Art Biennale, El Makhloufi was awarded the prestigious Thamgidi Prize. Since the summer of 2014, he has been working at the Cité des Arts in Paris as part of the Paris Scholarship.

In Nabil El Makhloufi's paintings, every line and every area serves a purpose within the overall composition. The interplay of paint and color is remarkably subtle—dry, almost imperceptibly nuanced layers give rise to individual contrasts that emerge like riffs, while sparse splashes of color refresh like oases.

This subtlety does not exist in a vacuum. El Makhloufi has stories to tell and concrete prophecies to make. In the years leading up to the "Arab Spring," his paintings anticipated the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. His "Crowds" and "Crossings" have been addressing the exodus that currently occupies us Europeans since 2008.