Rita Alaoui has always felt a deep connection with the living. Beginning as a painter—her primary medium—She later expanded into installation and performance, exploring the relationships humans establish with non-human entities and what they can teach us. For over ten years, She has built a collection of organic objects—memories of living forms threatened by ecosystem degradation. Like an archaeologist, She collects, classifies, draws, and integrates them into her paintings and installations. This evolving collection continues to inspire her work and research.
Alaoui practice blends references from botany, herbalism, animism, ritual, and ancestral knowledge, weaving a unified territory that transcends borders between Morocco and other lands. Through this, she aims to convey the interconnectedness of life and cultures, promoting ecological awareness, sustainability, and care for our planet. As an artist, Alaoui seek to rethink our relationship with the world, reinterpret the familiar, and imagine connections with the extraordinary.
AVAILABLE ARTWORKS BY RITA ALAOUI
WORKS ON CANVAS SERIES
FEUILLES SERIES
About the FEUILLES series: With Feuilles, Alaoui extends the trajectory begun with Objets trouvés and Anamorphia. Using kraft paper as support, she combines bold black lines and white acrylic gestures to render leaf-like forms that oscillate between figuration and abstraction.
The works foreground a central question of scale: the forms can be read as close-up botanical details or as expansive organic landscapes. The layered backgrounds, brushed in earthy tones, activate the surface, suggesting both material density and atmospheric depth.
OBJETS TROUVÉS SERIES
About the OBJETS TROUVÉS series: In this evocative series Objets trouvés, Rita Alaoui orchestrates a compelling visual excavation of ordinary remnants—fragments of nature rendered with profound reverence. Across a series (2014–2016), she uses white acrylic to depict these found objects on dense, matte black paper, conjuring a stark, meditative contrast.
The interplay between the luminous white forms and the abyss of black evokes a delicate tension: these natural fragments—bones, stones, seeds, and organic detritus—appear both spectral and palpable. Each drawing isolates an object from its environment, magnifying it into a study of texture, line, and formal presence. The lack of surrounding context transforms them into fragments of memory or relics suspended in time. They also open onto a question of scale: at once, these forms can be read as traces of the infinitesimal—microscopic seeds, veins, or mineral particles—or as vast, macrocosmic landscapes. This duality invites the viewer to oscillate between the infinitely small and the immeasurably large.
Alaoui’s approach is reminiscent of archaeological unearthing or botanical specimen study. The black ground becomes a void—a silent stage upon which forgotten or overlooked materials reclaim significance. In selecting and portraying these humble objects, she imparts them with newfound dignity, inviting viewers to rediscover their intrinsic poetry. Each piece is both intimate and expansive: intimate in its close attention to form and detail; expansive in the way it invites contemplation of life’s delicate traces. The monochrome palette heightens this reflective quality—stripping away distraction to focus purely on the silhouette, the grain, the gesture of each fragment. Ultimately, Objets trouvés can be read as a poetic archive—an encounter with passage, loss, and persistence. Through her minimalist yet deeply empathetic renderings, Rita Alaoui reminds us that even the most mundane elements of the natural world carry stories of time, transformation, and quiet beauty.
BLOOM SERIES
About the BLOOM series: With the Bloom series, Rita Alaoui pursues a motif that silently runs through her entire work: the flower. Present in her practice for over twenty years, it reappears here like a mantra, a repeated pictorial breath that marks the time of creation and that of life. Painting a flower, again and again, becomes for the artist a gesture of memory and rebirth—a stubborn reminder that everything that fades blooms again elsewhere, differently.
Bloom’s flowers emerge on paper like apparitions: vibrant, even pop figures against a walnut-brown background, sometimes crossed through with transparencies and drips. They seem to be born from a breath, from an inner movement rather than from an observation of reality. Far from any mimesis, they assert their singularity through repetition—each motif is unique, yet part of the same cycle, the same vital rhythm.
Following on from previous series, Bloom extends Rita Alaoui’s meditation on transformation, disappearance, and regeneration. The floral motif, like a recurring symbol, becomes the space for an intimate experience of time: a space where memory, matter, and light blend to express that beauty is always reborn from the living.
FEUILLAGES SERIES
About the FEUILLAGES series: These drawings move beyond mere depiction of plants to capture their energy, rhythm, and transformation—qualities central to Alaoui’s meditation on the cycles of nature and perception. The abstract, minimalist shapes are derived from leaves, yet they unfold like notes on a musical score: curves, contours, and spaces form rhythms that can be read, felt, and intuited. Each mark resonates like a beat or a pause, creating a silent melody that mirrors the pulse of growth, movement, and change, inviting the viewer to “hear” the harmonies of the natural world through the eye.
ANAMORPHIA SERIES
About the ANAMORPHIA series: Rita Alaoui continues and transforms the visual language explored in Objets trouvés. Here, the medium shifts: kraft paper lends warmth, ink introduces a more gestural, fluid mark-making, and the forms themselves become less literal, more ethereal. It is as if the tangible residue of the first series has—over time—dissolved into haunting silhouettes, traces of memory hovering between emergence and disappearance.
Against the subdued, earthy tone of kraft, inked lines unfurl with quiet assurance: slender strokes, shifting densities, and rhythmic undulations evoke natural elements—twined roots, seed pods, curled petals—or perhaps the ghostly contours of imagination. The imagery resists singular interpretation, instead inhabiting a threshold between recognition and abstraction, the familiar and the dreamlike.
As in Objets trouvés, the question of scale is central. The drawings can be perceived as fragments glimpsed through a microscope—cells, spores, mineral patterns—or as expansive macrocosmic forms reminiscent of fossils, astral bodies, or landscapes seen from afar. This simultaneous reading of the infinitely small and the immeasurably large destabilizes perception, opening a space of contemplation where boundaries collapse.
Alaoui’s work is grounded in a gentle archaeology or botanica: she collects natural detritus, observes with reverence, and allows form to emerge through meticulous composition. The result is consistently animistic: everyday fragments become imbued with spiritual resonance, testifying to the persistence of life, transformation, and the poetry of matter.
EXHIBITIONS
RITA ALAOUI
REPRESENTED ARTIST
Born in 1972 in Rabat, Morocco. Lives and works in Paris, France. Graduate of Parsons School of Design, New York. Rita Alaoui seeks to explore and rethink our relationship with the wild world and imagine connections with the extraordinary. Fascinated by the power of nature, by the healing virtues of plants, and concerned about a disappearing world, she focuses her approach on representing a dreamlike, sacred, and healing nature. Initially a painter, Rita Alaoui varied her modes of creation, ranging from painting to drawing, photography, installation, artist book and more recently video and performance. Growing up in Morocco, the ocean was her first source of inspiration. Since 2019, living in Paris, she has gathered objects from forests and countryside, and her paintings—at the heart of her artistic production—depict terrestrial and aquatic landscapes: lush, mysterious, human-absent, yet marked by traces of presence. Plants remain central to Alaoui practice, studied aesthetically, scientifically, and materially, fueling an imaginative universe within her work.
With a protocol that may recall that of botany or archaeology, she places collection, accumulation, and observation of natural and seemingly ordinary objects at the center of her work. She collects and meticulously organizes them in the temple that is her studio, granting them a form of unsuspected sacredness or spirituality. She imparts an animistic dimension to each small fragment of bone, stone, seed, or plant.
Her work is regularly exhibited in France, Morocco and internationally.