Mahjoub Ben Bella

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Mahjoub Ben Bella was a French–Algerian painter whose career unfolded between post-war European modernism and the visual legacies of North Africa. Educated initially at the École des Beaux-Arts in Oran, he continued his training in France at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing and later at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, establishing himself permanently in Tourcoing in 1975. His artistic approach, rooted in the idiom of Lyrical Abstraction, is distinguished by its synthesis of gestural abstraction with the structural principles of Arabic calligraphy and references to Sufi cosmology. Ben Bella’s practice was grounded in repetition, endurance, and the tactile properties of paint. Through densely worked surfaces and layered chromatic fields, he created a visual rhythm akin to script, transforming gesture into an act of meditative inscription. His interest in process led him to work across media—canvas, ceramic, and wood—blurring the boundaries between painting, object, and architectural space. Among his most ambitious undertakings were monumental public commissions: a twelve-kilometre painted section of the Paris–Roubaix cycling route (1986), a large mural for Riyadh International Airport (1982), a tribute to Nelson Mandela at Wembley Stadium (1988), and a ceramic installation of 1,800 tiles for the Tourcoing metro station (2000). His work has been widely exhibited and is represented in major public and private collections. Ben Bella’s visual language embodies a postcolonial interpretation of abstraction, in which colour, line, and rhythm negotiate between modernist experimentation and the metaphysical dimensions of his cultural inheritance. His oeuvre stands as a sustained reflection on ritual, materiality, and the transformative capacity of artistic labour.