Saâd Hassani was born in 1948 in Rabat. His vocation as a painter manifested itself very early, he was indeed sixteen years old at the time of his first personal exhibition. He frequents galleries, discovers the school of Paris, art brut, abstract expressionists, is passionate about Matisse and Paul Klee and the Moroccan painters Gharbaoui and Cherkaoui. His studio on the rue d'Alger in Rabat welcomes many painters, poets and intellectuals, foreign artists. He moved to Casablanca in 1972, facing the sea, to, in solitude, “collect debris from the landscape”.
In 1980 he exhibited at the Miro Foundation in Madrid. The opportunity for him to meet a number of Spanish artists including Antonio Saura in Cuenca, where, at the Museum of Abstract Art in the village, he discovered the painters Miares and especially Tapiés.
From 1990, his work moved away from abstract expressionism to return to a more figurative form. He experiments with sculpture, natural pigments, works the ephemeral on the sand of a beach in Oualidia. He is then recognized as one of the important actors of the Moroccan artist scene. In 1992, he created and directed for two years the Al Manar gallery in Casablanca. He produced a monumental work, a 210 m2 sail for the Universal Expo 98 in Lisbon.
In 1999, the National Gallery of Bab Rouah in Rabat devoted a personal exhibition to him. He exhibited a series of tondos in the same studio in 2003, then participated in 2005 in Rotterdam in “Contemporary art in Morocco”.
In 2006, he showed recent works at the Venise Cadre gallery in Casablanca and then at the Espace Actua Fondation Attijariwafabank. In February 2008, he exhibited at the Tindouf Gallery in Marrakech, a catalog was published with a text by Tahar Ben Jelloun: L'ombre du silence.
In 2010 at Villa Delaporte he showed Corps pluriel, the culmination of research on the representation of the body and its relationship to the essential questions of painting, which he then developed in 2011 during the exhibition Corps singuliers at the gallery Arcanes de Rabat, thus marking a new impetus in a course which for more than forty years has not ceased to renew itself, to surprise, while affirming its very great coherence.