Painting in the Exercise of Art is a two-part group exhibition curated by Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa, opening at the gallery’s Marrakech space on 27 December 2025. Developed in two chapters, the exhibition examines what painting becomes when it pushes beyond its traditional boundaries - materially, spatially, and conceptually.
The exhibition proposes a vision of painting with multiple anchors. Indeed, the term painting, traditionally associated with a single medium, can seem restrictive in relation to artistic universes where artistic practices are multiple and transversal. The title of the exhibition refers equally to the breaking down of boundaries between artistic practices, to the crossed and complementary approaches of the artists presented, and to the artists' references (historical, artistic, cultural, geographical, intimate or popular), which map out a field permeable to various artistic disciplines and research methods practiced.
The exhibition Painting in the Exercise of Art presents paintings and works that relate to the pictorial field and invite us to consider the notion of painting in its broadest extension.
The aim is to consider painting as a form of artistic production that is part of an experimental field open to installation, volume, photography, film,performance, and even the reassessment of pictorial works and practices. The exhibition articulates the specific contributions of these artists to a reflection on different spaces and aspects of painting, insofar as they fall within what might therefore be called its expanded field.
The exhibition unfolds in two stages. A first hanging (December 2025) offers a reflection on the challenges of a pictorial practice that exceeds the framework generally attributed to painting, both in terms of the conditions of its display and its physical characteristics (frame, canvas, stretcher, pigment).
This first journey offers the opportunity to discover works that participate in the passage that can take place between painting, adopted as a medium, and works belonging to the pictorial field, which call upon other uses of space, with a view to proposing a reflection on the limits of a plastic language associated with the painted object.
A second presentation (February 2026) unfolds as an extension of the first journey. It highlights the shift from the so-called frontal arrangement of painting, which reinforces in space the face-to-face encounter between the work and the viewer, toward the space of sculpture or artistic installation.
The latter refers to a fundamental questioning of the gestures and operations of spatial arrangement, namely the work and time through which objects take their place and position in an environment with which they are in constant interaction. The exhibition aims to demonstrate the permanence of exchanges between painting and the other arts, and to foster an understanding of the rich intermedial landscape of contemporary art. It brings together works by artists Walid Ardhaoui, Nassim Azarzar, Mustapha Azeroual, Amina Benbouchta, Khadija El Abyad, Radia Lamrani Karim, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux and Amina Rezki.
