Abderrahim Makhlouf was born in 1961 in Bab Berret (Morocco). He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Tetouan and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Nancy and now lives between Paris and Tangier.

His first education was nevertheless in the mountain of the Rif where he grew up. He discovers and learns early how to watch the colors and contrasts, the play of lights and shadows by which the surrounding forests are animated. The tranquillity and magnificence of nature is as much a source of inspiration as a refuge for him. There, he discovers a sense of freedom with which he has been working ever since.

Painting color and texture he reconfigurates the world around him by abstraction. His art is the product and the mirror of the complex relations between people and societies. Being both an emigrant and an immigrant, his work is nourished by power relations, explicit or unconscious and always tortuous that he observed in the course of his wanderings.

From his childhood during the reign of Hassan II in a Morocco still divided by the memory of the French and Spanish colonisation to his arrival in the Parisian suburb after living in Metz and Amsterdam, Abderrahim Makhlouf paints the tensions and the relations arising from history, politics and the confrontation of cultures.

The pigments and the glue his mixes on his canvas and the threads he sews on it depict those power relations in which there always remains a balance to find.