Kim Bennani
Born in Tetouan in 1972.
Lives and works in Casablanca
The young Kim was trained in the studio of his father, the painter Moa Bennani, whose influence he claims to have had and whose work he still deeply respects to this day.
At the age of eleven, Kim won first prize in an international drawing competition that foreshadowed his career as a painter (Chan Kars International Children Competition in New Delhi, India).
As a student at the Tetouan School of Fine Arts, young Kim continued his artistic studies in Spain, at the School of Applied Arts in Malaga.
Very quickly, Kim exhibits in France, Spain, and Morocco where he enjoys a good reputation.
In the beginning, Kim Bennani developed a hyper-realistic painting that he gradually abandoned after a three-month residency at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny during the summer of 2014. This residency marked an important step in the life and work of the artist. Through the study of landscape, the painter's practice was transformed towards an expression freer from the constraints of the academism learned in art schools. His intimate universe made of fleeting dreams and impalpable poetry, fantasy, and immediate instinct is then literally embodied in matter, pigment, line, and light with a beautiful harmony that he continues to exploit to this day.
"The landscape only comes to life once coupled with the matter, the landscape and more precisely its presence as tangible and fragile proof of existence is my only concern, this approach is for me a necessary conciliation between figuration and abstraction, said and suggested... " - Kim Bennani
Kim's work is now internationally recognized.