Born in Casablanca in 1950, Abdelkader Laâraj is a Moroccan painter and sculptor whose artistic practice unfolds with remarkable freedom across a wide range of mediums. For more than four decades, he has explored the relationship between material, the body and space, building a rich and distinctive body of work that has earned him both national and international recognition.
Based in Casablanca, Abdelkader Laâraj has exhibited his work in Morocco and abroad, including in France, Italy, Canada, the United States, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Winner of the first prize at the International Ice Sculpture Competition in Chicago in 1988, he has also left a strong impression through his artistic interventions in Asilah and his snow sculptures in Canada, reflecting a constant openness to new creative territories.
His work, multifaceted and in continuous evolution, is rooted in a search for dialogue between tradition and modernity, figuration and abstraction, material and movement.
Abdelkader Laâraj’s approach is grounded in a continuous exploration of gesture and material. As both a painter and sculptor, he approaches each work as a sensory and physical experience in which texture, density and light play an essential role.
In both his sculptures and his paintings, the body is often present, not as a depicted subject but as a trace, a tension or an energy. He explores the correspondences between flesh and matter, between the memory of the gesture and the transformation of form.
His visual universe reveals a poetics of embodiment: matter becomes alive, color breathes and volumes seem to move. Laâraj’s work becomes a space of dialogue between nature and the human presence, between the tangible and the unseen.
Deeply rooted in his time, Abdelkader Laâraj continues to renew the languages of Moroccan painting and sculpture, infusing them with a universal, sensory and spiritual dimension.