Nabil El Makhloufi was born in Fez in 1973.
Nabil El Makhloufi is a graduate of the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, a German city renowned for its famous school of figurative painting: the Neue Leipziger Schule.
Figuration remains the dominant element in Nabil El Makhloufi's aesthetic approach, and what best defines the originality of his art. Figuration imbues the canvas with a very particular universe. You don't know where realism ends and symbolism begins.
In Nabil El Makhloufi's paintings, time and space are fragmented, imposing a time of suspension on the viewer. Everything is disconcerting in the artist's works: the people, who stand out from the group and stand apart, are strikingly expressive, plunging us into their inner world, their doubts, their sense of strangeness and exile from their own environment.
Through his characters, Nabil El Makhloufi seems to challenge us on questions of belonging, communitarianism, and the scope left to the singularity of being within the partition of identity. In his painting, he tries to translate this relationship between the individual and the group, and reflects on the situation of the Arab world in general.
Naturally, his life as a foreigner also plays an important role in his art. Migration is an issue he has thought deeply about. It's not just about the recent, and widely publicized, difficulties experienced by refugees, but also about older patterns, going back generations.
His work has featured in solo and group exhibitions in Frankfurt (2015-2017), Casablanca (2013-2016-2019), London (2016), Dakar (2010) and Beirut (2008). In 2014, he was awarded the Cité des Arts prize in Paris (France). Nabil El Makhloufi's work has been acquired by the Musée Africain d'Art Contemporain Al Maaden (Morocco), Banque Populaire (Morocco), BAT Campus Galerie Collection (Germany), Norval Foundation (South Africa), Société Générale (Paris) and others.
Nabil El Makhloufi lives and works in Leipzig.