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Lot Essay
“There is a symmetry in what sometimes feels disorganised. The motion of things, their coming and going, their temporary partnerships and separations, their inhalations and exhalations, and their complex organisation is what I intuitively seek in these paintings.”
— Samia Halaby
Flowers in the Sky for Hala, painted in 1995, is a poignant tribute to Samia Halaby’s cousin, Hala, following her passing that same year. The work is one of the earliest compositions from Halaby’s Painterly Abstraction phase. Beginning in the early 1990s, this phase marked a shift in her artistic approach, from the precise dissection of simple geometries to a more spontaneous, intuitive application of colour and brushstroke.
In this work, Halaby draws inspiration from the organic geometry of flowers. Layers of brushstrokes in shades of grey, purple, blue, yellow, and red build upward across the canvas, gradually increasing in scale. This compositional motion evokes the sensation of petals rising and scattering in the sky, with the largest strokes hovering at the top, creating the illusion that the viewer is floating amidst them. The darker palette, accentuated by a prominent black mark, adds a somber tone to the composition, evoking the emotional weight of grief and the feeling of loss that underpins the work.
Samia Halaby, born in Jerusalem and displaced by the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, has established herself as a pioneering figure in contemporary abstraction. Raised in the United States, she began her professional career there and became the first woman appointed Associate Professor at the Yale School of Art in 1972, where she taught for a decade and mentored a new generation of artists.
Her contributions to modern and contemporary art are widely recognised. Halaby’s work is held in major public collections, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 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, Chicago; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, and The British Museum, London. Most recently, her work was presented at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, further cementing her legacy as one of the most important Arab artists of her generation.
— Samia Halaby
Flowers in the Sky for Hala, painted in 1995, is a poignant tribute to Samia Halaby’s cousin, Hala, following her passing that same year. The work is one of the earliest compositions from Halaby’s Painterly Abstraction phase. Beginning in the early 1990s, this phase marked a shift in her artistic approach, from the precise dissection of simple geometries to a more spontaneous, intuitive application of colour and brushstroke.
In this work, Halaby draws inspiration from the organic geometry of flowers. Layers of brushstrokes in shades of grey, purple, blue, yellow, and red build upward across the canvas, gradually increasing in scale. This compositional motion evokes the sensation of petals rising and scattering in the sky, with the largest strokes hovering at the top, creating the illusion that the viewer is floating amidst them. The darker palette, accentuated by a prominent black mark, adds a somber tone to the composition, evoking the emotional weight of grief and the feeling of loss that underpins the work.
Samia Halaby, born in Jerusalem and displaced by the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, has established herself as a pioneering figure in contemporary abstraction. Raised in the United States, she began her professional career there and became the first woman appointed Associate Professor at the Yale School of Art in 1972, where she taught for a decade and mentored a new generation of artists.
Her contributions to modern and contemporary art are widely recognised. Halaby’s work is held in major public collections, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 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, Chicago; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, and The British Museum, London. Most recently, her work was presented at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, further cementing her legacy as one of the most important Arab artists of her generation.