Mohammed Chabâa was born in Tangier in 1935.
After graduating from the Tétouan School of Fine Arts in 1955, he went to Italy to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome from 1962 to 1964. On his return to Morocco, he taught at the Casablanca School of Fine Arts. A former director of the Institut National des Beaux-Arts de Tétouan (1994-1998), Mohammed Chabâa is one of the leading figures in modern Moroccan painting.
He has held courageous positions on the identity of Moroccan painting in the magazine Souffles. He was one of those who vigorously called for the spirit of traditional creation to be introduced into Moroccan painting. He also advocated the integration of painting into urban spaces. The action he led in 1969 with a group of painters in Marrakech's Jemaa El Fna square is still cited as a model for those wishing to make their art accessible to a very wide audience.
Mohammed Chabâa rigorously adheres to the principle of the genesis of the visible. His paintings reveal the enigma of painting. Each of his works draws its force from the roots of the immemorial, from the palpable source of the act of painting, from that thrust of the arm: the gesture. His vision of the pictorial work is a quest for a pure state, where the stain, the line or the line delimit the fundamental tracings of painting. Both lyrical and geometrical, Mohammed Chabâa's painting is dominated by abstraction, while incorporating elements of the outside world.
The artist has published extensively on Moroccan painting. In 2008, he was awarded the Wissam de l'ordre Officier by King Mohammed VI, and has received a number of distinctions, including Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1992, following his work with Moroccan craftsmen at the Rome mosque.
His works have been included in prestigious collections including those of Bank Al-Maghreb (Morocco), the ONA Foundation (Morocco), the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Morocco), the Ministry of Culture (Morocco) and the Barjeel Collection (United Arab Emirates).
Mohammed Chabâa passed away in 2013.