Untitled I Rita Alaoui

Rita Alaoui is a Franco-Moroccan artist who was born in Rabat in 1972 and now lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the Parsons School of Design in New York, where she lived until the late 1990s.

Fascinated by the power of nature and the healing properties of plants, and concerned about a world that is disappearing, her work focuses on the representation of a dreamlike, sacred and healing nature.

Although strongly influenced by the wild landscapes and distinctive light of Morocco that shaped her childhood, her work is universal. Her paintings, which make up a large part of her artistic output, depict landscapes and waterscapes that are both mysterious and lush.

Plants are omnipresent in her paintings and her work. The artist aims to study them from a scientific, practical and aesthetic point of view. The materiality of the plant itself interests her and nourishes an imaginary world that surrounds her work and practice.

More recently, and over the last few years, the artist has been working on a project inspired by her own family history of healing with plants (Lawsonia Cataplasm Garden). This project rethinks our relationship with care, medicine and transmission, and stands at the junction between ecological concerns and a form of reconnection with nature and age-old traditions. Her artistic work is therefore universal in scope, blending a number of references, from botany to herbalism, from animism to the ritual practices of ancestral cultures, from the knowledge of the ancients to modernity... all these elements lead her to summon up one and the same territory, enabling her to transcend the borders between her country of origin, Morocco, and other lands.