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Lot Essay
“I had visited the Dome of the Rock as well as the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus several times. The inlaid marble I admired influenced my work during the creative impasse of 1979. I began to divide the painting into sections derived from its rectangular shape. I used a 45-degree diagonal and two squares as basic elements and textured the shapes to distinguish them from each other in imitation of the marble inlays.” – Samia Halaby (M. Farhat, Samia Halaby: Five Decades of Painting and Innovation, London 2013).
Three Way, Seven is a vibrant example from Samia Halaby’s Dome of the Rock series. In this body of work, Halaby revisited the formal discoveries inspired by her first encounter with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in 1966. Drawing on the geometric abstraction of its architecture and mosaic decoration, she allowed the rectangular format of her work to generate its internal forms, filling them with shaded cylinders and helixes recalling those developed in her earlier series Geometric Still-Lifes (1966–70) and Helixes and Cycloids (1971–75). In Three Way, Seven, cylindrical and helix forms in black, magenta and green intersect and overlap to generate broad diagonal movements across the composition, while angular planes of ochre, violet and cream create a dynamic balance between movement and structure. The series also marked a significant shift in Halaby’s use of colour, moving away from the gradual tonal shading that characterised her earlier work towards a greater emphasis on saturated colour and surface texture. As one of the later works in the Dome of the Rock series, Three Way, Seven brings together the diagonal structures of her earlier practice with the intensified colour relationships and tactile effects that emerged during this period.
The significance of these formal developments extends beyond their architectural sources. Halaby’s experience of displacement was fundamental to the formation of her intellectual and artistic outlook. Born in Jerusalem in 1936, she was displaced with her family in 1948 and lived in Beirut before immigrating to the United States in 1951. Her experience of exile gave her an acute awareness of the social and political structures that shape individual lives, while her subsequent position as a Palestinian artist working in the United States placed her outside many of the dominant narratives of American art. It was within this context that Marxist thought became an important part of Halaby’s intellectual formation, offering a framework through which questions of inequality, social organisation and collective struggle could be understood. Her engagement with leftist ideas also opened a path towards the Russian avant-garde, whose revolutionary conception of art resonated with her understanding of abstraction as a means of investigating the material world rather than as an autonomous aesthetic language. Halaby has explained that her initial attraction to Cubism and Russian Constructivism was aesthetic, but that these interests subsequently became aligned with her leftist political and social views. Her understanding of abstraction was therefore shaped by an unusually broad constellation of influences: Palestinian visual and architectural traditions, the intellectual legacy of the Russian avant-garde, Western modernism and her own experience of displacement.
Three Way, Seven emerges from this distinctive convergence of memory, displacement and formal inquiry. Rather than depicting the Dome of the Rock, Halaby transforms its geometric principles into an autonomous abstract language in which the architectural memory of Jerusalem encounters the structural logic of Russian Constructivism. In bringing these traditions together, Halaby expands the conventional history of abstraction beyond its predominantly European and American frameworks, allowing Islamic architecture, Arabic ornament, Russian Constructivism and American abstraction to intersect within a deeply personal visual language.
New York-based Palestinian artist Samia Halaby is a major figure in Arab modernism and international abstraction. Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Halaby was displaced from her homeland during the mass displacement of Palestinians following the 1948 Nakba and was later raised in the United States. She received an MFA in Painting from Indiana University in 1963 and subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University’s School of Art, where she held a faculty position for ten years. In 1964, while teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute, she received a research grant that enabled her to travel to the Eastern Mediterranean, deepening her engagement with the geometric abstraction of Islamic architecture. Through sustained experimentation with materials, geometry and perception, she developed a practice concerned with the ways abstraction can reconfigure our understanding of reality and visual experience.
Her work is held in major institutional collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Abu Dhabi; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Institut du monde arabe, Paris; British Museum, London and Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman. In 2024, her work was featured for the first time at the 60th Venice Biennale, where she received a Special Mention from the Jury.
Three Way, Seven is a vibrant example from Samia Halaby’s Dome of the Rock series. In this body of work, Halaby revisited the formal discoveries inspired by her first encounter with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in 1966. Drawing on the geometric abstraction of its architecture and mosaic decoration, she allowed the rectangular format of her work to generate its internal forms, filling them with shaded cylinders and helixes recalling those developed in her earlier series Geometric Still-Lifes (1966–70) and Helixes and Cycloids (1971–75). In Three Way, Seven, cylindrical and helix forms in black, magenta and green intersect and overlap to generate broad diagonal movements across the composition, while angular planes of ochre, violet and cream create a dynamic balance between movement and structure. The series also marked a significant shift in Halaby’s use of colour, moving away from the gradual tonal shading that characterised her earlier work towards a greater emphasis on saturated colour and surface texture. As one of the later works in the Dome of the Rock series, Three Way, Seven brings together the diagonal structures of her earlier practice with the intensified colour relationships and tactile effects that emerged during this period.
The significance of these formal developments extends beyond their architectural sources. Halaby’s experience of displacement was fundamental to the formation of her intellectual and artistic outlook. Born in Jerusalem in 1936, she was displaced with her family in 1948 and lived in Beirut before immigrating to the United States in 1951. Her experience of exile gave her an acute awareness of the social and political structures that shape individual lives, while her subsequent position as a Palestinian artist working in the United States placed her outside many of the dominant narratives of American art. It was within this context that Marxist thought became an important part of Halaby’s intellectual formation, offering a framework through which questions of inequality, social organisation and collective struggle could be understood. Her engagement with leftist ideas also opened a path towards the Russian avant-garde, whose revolutionary conception of art resonated with her understanding of abstraction as a means of investigating the material world rather than as an autonomous aesthetic language. Halaby has explained that her initial attraction to Cubism and Russian Constructivism was aesthetic, but that these interests subsequently became aligned with her leftist political and social views. Her understanding of abstraction was therefore shaped by an unusually broad constellation of influences: Palestinian visual and architectural traditions, the intellectual legacy of the Russian avant-garde, Western modernism and her own experience of displacement.
Three Way, Seven emerges from this distinctive convergence of memory, displacement and formal inquiry. Rather than depicting the Dome of the Rock, Halaby transforms its geometric principles into an autonomous abstract language in which the architectural memory of Jerusalem encounters the structural logic of Russian Constructivism. In bringing these traditions together, Halaby expands the conventional history of abstraction beyond its predominantly European and American frameworks, allowing Islamic architecture, Arabic ornament, Russian Constructivism and American abstraction to intersect within a deeply personal visual language.
New York-based Palestinian artist Samia Halaby is a major figure in Arab modernism and international abstraction. Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Halaby was displaced from her homeland during the mass displacement of Palestinians following the 1948 Nakba and was later raised in the United States. She received an MFA in Painting from Indiana University in 1963 and subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University’s School of Art, where she held a faculty position for ten years. In 1964, while teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute, she received a research grant that enabled her to travel to the Eastern Mediterranean, deepening her engagement with the geometric abstraction of Islamic architecture. Through sustained experimentation with materials, geometry and perception, she developed a practice concerned with the ways abstraction can reconfigure our understanding of reality and visual experience.
Her work is held in major institutional collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Abu Dhabi; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Institut du monde arabe, Paris; British Museum, London and Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman. In 2024, her work was featured for the first time at the 60th Venice Biennale, where she received a Special Mention from the Jury.