.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
One of the most significant artists to emerge in the modern and contemporary Arab art scene, Samia Halaby’s body of work demonstrates a sustained engagement with abstraction. Her experimental practice not only adds a rich layer to the history of modern Arab art, but also necessitates an expansion of the narratives of international modernism.
Return (No. 323) by Samia Halaby is part of her Diagonal Flight series which she produced from 1974 to 1979. This series followed her three dimensional geometric abstraction work where she explored the representation of depth and geometry through shading, light and colour. While that series was more concerned with the exploration of the edge to represent an object, Halaby’s Diagonal Flight series explored the representation of infinity, distance and time. By creating multiple parallel diagonal lines that run from one edge of the canvas to another, Halaby evokes an idea of ‘flight’ through movement, which as a result, signifies the passage of time.
Unlike most of the works in the series, the movement of some of the lines in Return is disrupted through a diagonal cut. Halaby employs a similar disruption in one other work in the series titled Time Delay where she shifts the colour of the lines to beautifully explore a visual notion of a missed lapse in time. In Return, however, the cut acts as a complete disruption to the movement of the lines, creating a missing triangular area from the sequence. This same triangular area ‘returns’ or reappears from another edge having been mirrored or transformed. The title of the piece as well as the visual representation of this obstacle and the tenacity of the lines, begs the question of what social and political notion Samia is trying to portray through this work as a Palestinian living in the diaspora.
To the Arab world, Samia Halaby is a trailblazer of abstraction. Born in Jerusalem in 1936 and raised in different places across the United States, Halaby embarked on her professional journey immediately after obtaining her MFA in Painting from Indiana University in 1963. Between the 1960s and the late 1980s, Halaby taught at various universities in the United States. For a period of ten years, she held the distinction of being the first female associate professor at Yale University’s School of Art. In 1964, while serving as a faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute, Halaby received a research grant that allowed her to travel to the Eastern Mediterranean, during which she delved into the world of geometric abstraction present in the Islamic architecture of the region. By conducting experiments with various surface media that marked the beginning of a lifelong exploration into the principles of abstract art, she sought to understand the essence of reality and its enactment in material form. Heavily influenced by the abstract movements of cubism and futurism, Halaby is motivated by the belief that innovative approaches to painting create the potential for reconfiguring perceptions, not only in the realm of aesthetics but also as significant contributions to technological and social progress.
Samia Halaby’s works are part of numerous institutional collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Detroit Institute of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Institut du monde arabe; and The British Museum, London.
Return (No. 323) by Samia Halaby is part of her Diagonal Flight series which she produced from 1974 to 1979. This series followed her three dimensional geometric abstraction work where she explored the representation of depth and geometry through shading, light and colour. While that series was more concerned with the exploration of the edge to represent an object, Halaby’s Diagonal Flight series explored the representation of infinity, distance and time. By creating multiple parallel diagonal lines that run from one edge of the canvas to another, Halaby evokes an idea of ‘flight’ through movement, which as a result, signifies the passage of time.
Unlike most of the works in the series, the movement of some of the lines in Return is disrupted through a diagonal cut. Halaby employs a similar disruption in one other work in the series titled Time Delay where she shifts the colour of the lines to beautifully explore a visual notion of a missed lapse in time. In Return, however, the cut acts as a complete disruption to the movement of the lines, creating a missing triangular area from the sequence. This same triangular area ‘returns’ or reappears from another edge having been mirrored or transformed. The title of the piece as well as the visual representation of this obstacle and the tenacity of the lines, begs the question of what social and political notion Samia is trying to portray through this work as a Palestinian living in the diaspora.
To the Arab world, Samia Halaby is a trailblazer of abstraction. Born in Jerusalem in 1936 and raised in different places across the United States, Halaby embarked on her professional journey immediately after obtaining her MFA in Painting from Indiana University in 1963. Between the 1960s and the late 1980s, Halaby taught at various universities in the United States. For a period of ten years, she held the distinction of being the first female associate professor at Yale University’s School of Art. In 1964, while serving as a faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute, Halaby received a research grant that allowed her to travel to the Eastern Mediterranean, during which she delved into the world of geometric abstraction present in the Islamic architecture of the region. By conducting experiments with various surface media that marked the beginning of a lifelong exploration into the principles of abstract art, she sought to understand the essence of reality and its enactment in material form. Heavily influenced by the abstract movements of cubism and futurism, Halaby is motivated by the belief that innovative approaches to painting create the potential for reconfiguring perceptions, not only in the realm of aesthetics but also as significant contributions to technological and social progress.
Samia Halaby’s works are part of numerous institutional collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Detroit Institute of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Institut du monde arabe; and The British Museum, London.