Bouchta El Hayani was born in 1952 in Taounate.
A graduate of the École des Arts appliqués de Casablanca in decoration and graphic arts, Bouchta El Hayani has taught since 1975 at the Centre pédagogique régional in Rabat as well as at the National School of Architecture, alongside his artistic practice. In 1998, he completed a residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris.
Active since the early 1970s, he is associated with the Rabat group and has maintained close ties with several major figures of Moroccan painting, including Mohamed Kacimi, Fouad Bellamine, Miloud Labied and Hassan Slaoui.
His work went through several non-figurative periods during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, marked by a research into materiality, pigment and colour. In the early 2000s, he returned to the human figure, developing a pictorial vocabulary centred on figures represented in profile, which became recurrent throughout his work.
Bouchta El Hayani’s painting is characterised by a physical relationship to matter and by a particular attention to earth, textures and the density of pigment. Between figuration and abstraction, his works develop a dimension that is both meditative and deeply rooted in materiality.
His works are held in several public and private collections, including the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Morocco), the Fondation ONA (Morocco), the Caisse de Dépôt et de Gestion (Morocco), the Institut du monde arabe (France) and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation (Tunisia).
Bouchta El Hayani lives and works in Rabat.