Zakaria Ramhani was born in Tangier in 1983.
Zakaria Ramhani came into contact with painting at an early age in his father's studio. He then obtained a teaching diploma in plastic arts and soon left the civil service to devote himself exclusively to his artistic practice.
Zakaria Ramhani has developed a distinctive language in which Arabic or Latin script is used as a pictorial gesture in the service of a figural order. This gesturality gives rhythm to the artist's works, endowing them with a density rarely equaled, due to the abundance of strokes and the multiplication of letters. The originality of this work lies in the fact that the final image embraces the abundance of graphic lines in perfect order, making them lose their scriptural status and elevate them to the status of a simple painter's line.
To appreciate the artist's international appeal, we need only mention that Artprice, the website specializing in artist ratings, ranked him in 2010 as one of the world's top 10 artists under the age of thirty.
Zakaria Ramhani's work has been presented with the British Museum in London at the Word Into Art exhibition, at the 8th edition of the Dak'art Biennial (Senegal), at the 11th edition of the Cairo Biennial (Egypt), at international fairs such as Art Dubai and Art Paris-Abu Dhabi (UAE) and Art Central Hong Kong, in the Interoenia Extrart project in Italy, under the direction of Achille Bonito Oliva (former chief curator of the Venice Biennale), in Paris at the Institut du Monde Arabe, at the National Museum of Bahrain and at the Barbican Center in London.
His work has been included in prestigious collections including the Bank Al Maghrib (Morocco), the Fondation Alliances (Morocco), the Musée d'art contemporain Africain Al Maaden (Morocco), the Royal Mansour (Morocco), the Vanhaerents Art Collection (Belgium), the Alain Dominique Perrin Collection (France), the Fondation Cartier (France), the Fondation Jean-Paul Blachère (France), the Fondation Barjeel (United Arab Emirates), and numerous private collections.
Zakaria Ramhani lives and works between Tangier and Montreal.