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Meet the Collector: Yasmine Berrada Wants to Change the Way the World Sees Moroccan Art

She has spent nearly two decades building one of the country's most important contemporary art spaces, while quietly assembling a collection guided entirely by instinct and love.

“When it comes to art, I’ve always followed my intuition,” Yasmine Berrada tells Observer. We are at Loft Gallery in Casablanca, surrounded by the abstract, geometric and seaweed-like works of Malika Agueznay, a pioneer artist of the celebrated Casablanca school. “I feel that the art world is deeply emotional; so you have to put your heart fully into it.” And Berrada certainly does. When we meet her, she cuts an understated and elegant figure, dressed all in white, having just returned from an intense week in Doha for Art Basel Qatar, where she showcased the iridescent work of Mustapha Azeroual in the gallery’s booth.

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In Casablanca, it’s like the calm after the storm, and the gallerist feels a bit dizzy as we walk through a room of works by Moroccan artist Malika Agueznay, reminiscent in its immersive quality of a Yayoi Kusama installation. We sit down in the back of the gallery, and Berrada orders some mint tea. She founded Loft Gallery in 2009 with her sister Myriem, basing it on the idea of a New York-style art-filled loft. From day one, the gallery represented something new in Morocco; it has since expanded with a three-story space in Marrakech.

According to Berrada, the market for Moroccan art was much more contained back then. “There were many art dealers, but very few galleries were doing structured, long-term work. It was a very local market. Moroccans bought only Moroccan art and were not interested in international work. And foreigners did not collect much Moroccan art. There was also a lot of mimicry; people always collected the same artists.”

Loft’s primary objective was to recover the history of Moroccan modernism, particularly the Casablanca School and the........

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