AMINA BENBOUCHTA

Early Years

Amina Benbouchta was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1963. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1986 with a degree in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies. Moving to Paris, she studied drawing, lithography and engraving while working as an auditor at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris. During the 1990s, she ran the fashion and culture magazine Les Alignés; in 2005, she was a co-founder of Collectif 212, an initiative designed to support contemporary Moroccan art.

Amina Benbouchta: Artworks

Writing on her profile page on Sabrina Amrani Gallery’s website, Benbouchta says: “I prefer to devote myself to a work that asks questions of the future of the human being, in a universal way, without constantly bringing back the debate to the details of origin or identity.”

As a multidisciplinary artist, Amina Benbouchta brings her interest in anthropology from her first degree to her body of work. Familiar objects reappear in different phases of her practice—for example, a crinoline, a rabbit, a sewing machine—but they are rarely in familiar contexts, instead floating out of blank parts of the canvas or becoming sculptural. The crinoline is significant as a tool for both the beautification and the enslavement of the female body

She uses a range of materials and media—charcoal, paint, photography, canvas, glossy paper, grease chalk, collage, balls of wool—and in past exhibitions has used the entire gallery space rather than merely the walls. While canvases from her mid-2020s work can appear stark, with objects seemingly suspended against a light background, later pieces reveal more use of colour and a more dreamy appearance.

Memory is a key element of Benbouchta’s work: she has said that she memories and that she looks at reality through her childhood memories.

• Gorgons (2024) saw the integration of embroidery into Benbouchta’s practice as part of an artistic dialogue between Morocco and India.
• Untitled (2023) brings vivid colour to the fore: flowers are foregrounded with arrangements of plants, yet also hinted at through bright, blurred, dreamy background imagery.
• In the Lost Paradise series of three paintings (2022), Amina Benbouchta combines oil pastel, acrylic and collage on paper. Bright tomato red and darker brown objects—a clown, pliers, socks, a human leg, monster forms—pop against the pale background.

Amina Benbouchta: Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• The Quiet Language of Life, MRS Art, London (2026)
• Le Corps Spirituel et l’Esprit Charnel, Palais El Badii, Marrakech (2023)
• One Pound of Flesh, Ceysson & Bénétière, Lyon (2023)
• Are Angel Trumpets Poisonous? Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid (2022)
• On the edge, Galerie Dar El Bacha, Marrakesh (2019)
• Down the Rabbit Hole, Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid (2013)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Femmes Photographes, Musée National de la Photographie, Rabat (2022)
• Bum Bum Ba Ye, Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid (2021)
• United Artists, Movenpick Hotel Mansour Eddahbi, Marrakech (2020)

Further reading

• Amina Benbouchta’s Instagram
• A 2025 interview with Judith Benhamou
• Artist profile page at Sabrina Amrani Gallery
• Collectif 212’s Instagram

Amina Benbouchta FAQs

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