Loft Art Gallery presents Casablanca Imaginiste, a solo exhibition of new works by Moroccan painter Abdelkrim Ghattas (b. 1945, Casablanca) at the gallery’s Casablanca space. Opening on 9 October 2025 and curated by Maud Houssais, the exhibition highlights Ghattas’s radical exploration of space and time in painting.
A pioneering graduate of the Casablanca Art School (1969), Ghattas has played a key role in shaping Morocco’s modern art scene. With Casablanca Imaginiste, his second solo exhibition at Loft Art Gallery, the artist reimagines Casablanca as an imaginary Bauhaus capital, a city transformed into a psychogeographic landscape where memory and imagination intersect.
Ghattas’s works are infused with fragments of his personal and collective history: the port where his father was Morocco’s first professional diver and where he first encountered an easel painter; the loom of his aunt, endlessly in motion; the Beaux-Arts school where jewellery and carpets became radical alternatives to classical models, shaping new visual languages.
Through these layered references, Ghattas renders Casablanca both real and imagined - a site of memory, invention and radical possibility. His paintings extend beyond their frames, resonating as visual testimonies of a city that has continually reinvented itself across past, present and future.
Reflecting Loft Art Gallery’s mission to champion Moroccan, Arab and African artistic heritage while fostering global dialogue, Casablanca Imaginiste situates Ghattas at the heart of modernism’s ongoing story.
