Jilali Gharbaoui was a leading artist of the modernist movement in Morocco. Unlike his contemporaries such as Ahmed Cherkaoui, who grounded their modernist practice in symbols of Moroccan culture, Gharbaoui rooted his abstraction in the materiality of paint and gesture of the brushstroke on canvas. Practicing as both a painter and sculptor, Gharbaoui’s earlier works are relatively representational. His later abstract works, however, such as this 1969 painting, highlight the movement of the brushwork and emphasise the layered, texture of the paint on the canvas. Notice, for instance, the loose red brushstrokes whose linear repetition forms the background and the buildup of paint around the white circular forms. Gharbaoui’s hand is emphasised further by leaving patches of canvas untouched by paint.

Born in 1930 in the Sidi Kacem region of Morocco, Gharbaoui began studying art while in secondary school in Fes at the Academie des Arts. With the support of novelist Ahmed Sefrioui, the director of fine arts in Rabat, Gharbaoui was able to continue his training at the École des Beaux Art in Paris, later spending a year studying in Rome as well. Throughout his life, the artist suffered from mental illness and in 1971 his body was found on a public bench in the Champs de Mars in Paris; it was repatriated to Morocco and the artist is buried in Fes. Despite his short life, Gharbaoui’s work has been celebrated worldwide, including a 1993 retrospective at Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.