Mohamed Hamidi

Mohamed Hamidi was born in Casablanca on 7 August 1941. He studied at the city's École des Beaux-Arts, finishing in 1958, and moved to Paris the next year, joining the Grande Chaumière studio; he entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1962, became the assistant of the French painter Jean Aujame and obtained a diploma in monumental art in 1964. In 1967 he returned to teach at the Casablanca school, where Farid Belkahia, Mohamed Melehi and Mohamed Chabâa were reinventing art education around Moroccan crafts and signs. He taught there until 1975 and became one of the core members of what is now called the Casablanca School. In 1969 he was among the painters who hung their work in the open air on the Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech, the exhibition often seen as the movement's founding act.

His painting combines flat, bright colour and hard-edged geometric forms with the human body: stylised, often erotic figures merged with signs drawn from carpets, tattoos and amulets. He also worked in mural and public art. In 2019 the Centre Pompidou in Paris acquired two of his paintings, Harmonie (1971) and Marie (1972). He was a co-founder of the Moroccan Association of Plastic Arts, dated to 1972 in one source.

Hamidi died in Casablanca on 6 October 2025, aged 84.

How to look at a Hamidi: find the body first, then the pattern. The figures are flattened into colour fields, and the signs from carpets, tattoos and amulets run through them, so a form can read as a torso and a textile at once. That reading is this site's own.

Where to see the work

The Centre Pompidou holds Harmonie and Marie; the Dalloul Art Foundation (Dafbeirut), Ocula and Loft Art Gallery publish works and a biography. Ask each what is on view. See our lists of Moroccan painters and Moroccan artists, and the painter-novelist Mahi Binebine.