Tahar Ben Jelloun
Born in 1944, lives and works in Paris.
Tahar Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan-French writer and visual artist whose literary and artistic practices form a deeply interconnected expression of cultural identity, memory, and political consciousness. Internationally acclaimed for his novels, essays, and poetry – many of which explore the psychological impacts of exile, racism, and identity – Ben Jelloun’s turn toward visual art in recent decades has expanded his creative vocabulary into the realms of gesture, symbol, and abstraction.
His paintings and drawings carry the same poetic density and social urgency that characterize his writing. Often infused with calligraphic elements, fragmented text, and vibrant color fields, his visual works become palimpsests of thought and feeling, where language dissolves into texture, and meaning emerges through rhythm and intuition. Inspired by Arabic script but refusing to adhere to traditional forms, Ben Jelloun’s painterly line inhabits a space between legibility and lyrical freedom, conjuring a spiritual language of its own.
Though rooted in personal and cultural histories, his visual art is decidedly contemporary, reflecting on migration, identity politics, and the inner turmoil of the postcolonial condition. As in his literature, Ben Jelloun seeks not merely to depict, but to provoke – a sense of empathy, a confrontation with injustice, or a moment of introspective stillness. His work serves as a bridge between North African aesthetics and European modernism, resisting easy categorization and affirming hybridity as a generative force.
In recent years, Ben Jelloun’s artworks have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Europe and North Africa, gaining growing recognition among collectors, curators, and institutions. His dual identity as both a major literary figure and a painter allows for a unique interplay of narrative and abstraction, where words and images continuously echo, distort, and reinforce one another.
As the first North African author to win the Prix Goncourt, Ben Jelloun has long been a cultural interlocutor between worlds. His art, like his literature, invites us to inhabit complexity and contradiction – to find, within layers of language and form, a shared humanity shaped by displacement, resilience, and imagination.
