Zakaria Ramhani
Zakaria Ramhani was born in 1983 in Tangier, Morocco.
He was introduced to painting very early in his father’s studio. He obtained his art plastic diploma and worked as an art teacher in Morocco but gave up quickly the public service to devote himself to his art.
Since 2004, Zakaria has carried out a project entitled “From Right to Left” in which he explores the relations between the art of portrait and the Arabic and Latin writting language and calligraphy. Zakaria developed a particular language where the Arab or Latin written form is used as a pictorial gesture serving the figurative. This action painting puts rhythm into the artist’s paintings and endows it with a density rarely equalled, owing to a riots of lines and multiplication of letters. The originality of his work lies in the fact that the final picture includes, in a perfect order, the profusion of the graphic sense of a line to raising them to the rank of a simple line drawn by a painter.
Zakaria has shown his work in several exhibitions. Among the international collective exhibitions, we can mention the Arab World Institute of Paris (France), the Bahrain National Museum, the Emirate Palace in Abu Dhabi, the Barbican Centre of London (United Kingdom), the 8th Biennale of Dak’art in Senegal (May 2008), where he represented his country, Word Into Art, organized by the British Museum of London at the International Financial Centre of Dubai. Intermoenia Extrart, Barletta , Italy (under the direction of Achille Bonito Oliva ) in December 2008, he was invited to the 11th Cairo Biennale In Egypt. He appears regularly in auctions including Christie’s (Dubai). Recently he presented his work at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Mohammed VI in Rabat Morocco.
His work can be found in prestigious art collections such as the Vanhaerent art collection Brussels Belgium, Museum of Contemporary African Art MACAAL, Marrakesh Morocco Bank Al Maghrib Museum (Morocco), Jean-Paul Blachère’s Foundation (France), the Barjeel Foundation (EAU), Alain Dominique Perrin (CartierFrance Foundation), the Olympic chinese committee, China, Steptoe’s collection in Washington DC.
Zakaria Ramhani’s works have been featured in top-notch art publications and newspapers including the New York Times, Al Arabia, CNN, and Al Jazeera.
