Yassine Balbzioui

Yassine Balbzioui is a Moroccan multidisciplinary artist. He works and lives in Marrakech. His work evolves around different axes: being mainly a painter and draftsman, he develops, in a neo expressionist style, a production of high formal and semantic richness where the representation of human animality, often under the cover of a mask, crosses the notions of derision, of idiocy, of the grotesque, apprehended as artistic postures.

With a distanced mindset, close to Fluxus simplicity (although it has no formal relationship with this movement), his dramatic work expresses in a radical and systematic way the “spirit of seriousness” and strives with vitalism and raw energy that cannot be denied, towards intertwining art and life.

Biography

Born in 1972, he has attended, in the 1990s, different artistic trainings. He holds several diplomas (3rd year of the School of Fine Arts in Casablanca (Morocco), DNAP and DNSEP of the school of fine arts in Bordeaux (France). Then in 2001 and 2002, he took part in a training of arts and media belonging to the Education Abroad Program at the University of Berkeley, California (USA).

Selected by the curator Simon Njami for the 12th and 13^th edition of the Biennale of Dakar (Senegal), Yassine Balbzioui has exhibited his work around the world for fifteen years: in France (Paris, in 2014-2015 at l’Institut du Monde Arabe for the exhibition Le Maroc contemporain, but also in Bordeaux, Montluçon and Nantes), in Morocco (in the inaugural exhibition of the Mohammed VI Museum in 2014, at Le Cube – independent art room,  l’Appartement 22, but also in Casablanca, Rabat, Essaouira), India in Hyderabad.

• Press articles on Yassine Balbzioui
• CV of Yassine Balbzioui