Fouad Bellamine was born in 1950 in Fez.
A graduate of the École des Arts appliqués de Casablanca in 1967, he held his first exhibition in 1972 at Galerie La Découverte in Rabat. That same year, he began teaching visual arts before continuing his studies with a Diplôme d’Études Appliquées in art history and theory at the Université de la Sorbonne, Paris 1.
Actively involved in debates surrounding Moroccan artistic identity from the 1970s onward, he formulated a position that would remain closely associated with his name: “there is no Moroccan painting, there are only Moroccan painters.”
His first exhibition in Paris in 1980 was acclaimed by critics. He then settled in Paris, where he lived for nearly a decade, developing a painting practice centred on arches, arcades and vaults, in which pictorial gesture and the construction of space are inseparable. Light occupies a central place in his work, structuring space as much as it reveals it.
In 2020, he became the first Moroccan artist to be honoured, during his lifetime, with a retrospective exhibition at the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, entitled Entrée en matière.
His works are held in several public and private collections, including the Institut du monde arabe (France), the Fonds national d’art contemporain (France), the Kinda Foundation (Saudi Arabia), the Mathaf Museum of Modern Art (Qatar) and the Sharjah Art Museum (United Arab Emirates).
Fouad Bellamine lives and works between Paris and Rabat.