Mustafa Arruf

Mustafa Hamed Moh Arruf (8 June 1958 – 10 February 2025) was a Spanish sculptor.

Life and career

Mustafa Hamed Moh Arruf, was born in Nador, in 1958. He began his artistic studies at the School of Applied Arts and Artistic Trades in Melilla and continued his training in Fine Arts in the city of Granada (Spain). His early vocation is painting and sculpture and, although he worked with materials such as wood, stone (in Holland), and bronze, it is with this material that he best expressed his art.

In the mid 1980s, he moved to Germany, where he performed various works presented at the House of Spain in Frankfurt. After a brief residency in Holland, he moved to Madrid, in the nineties, an artistically very productive period, and worked with the MAGISA Bronze Foundry and the Art Gallery Series. Later he worked in the public program of Taller Schools and Oficio Houses, where he performed different teaching tasks, until he obtained a position as a restorer in the Archaeological Museum of the city of Melilla.

As the whole of his work, his urban sculpture —which is exhibited in squares, streets, avenues, parks and gardens of different countries— and public —which is exhibited in centers of different administrations— presents an important diversity, in which Artistic (ornamental) elements are combined with expressive (conceptual) elements.

A group of his works —promoted by public or private institutions, and made from his beginnings as a sculptor, in 1985, until today— the form busts or statues of famous people born or linked to his hometown: to teaching (Juan Caro Romero, 1985), to painting (Victorio Manchón, 1994), to the letters and theatrical representation (the playwright Fernando Arrabal, 1994, the poet Miguel Fernández, 1994, and the actor and theater director Antonio César Jiménez Segura, 2007), and architecture (Enrique Nieto, 2008). Another grouping forms more avant-garde sculptures, with strong contrasts in its design: flat/ volume, soft/rough, hard/soft and, above all, diagonal/circular, with quarters of moon that makes his works contain a dynamic balance and tension.