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Lot Essay
“A friend came to visit and immediately told me how much she loved this painting because as she said, they were her colours, the colours of Palestinian embroidery. After she left, I realised that she was right. I had unconsciously utilised the embroidery colours of the mountain villages of Palestine. Not only had I used red and black overwhelmingly, I had also scattered a few bright colours, yellow, blue and green, amidst the dominant red expanse. This is precisely the formal attribute consciously used by the embroiderers who call it takheel. The word refers to accentuating the beauty of things, especially eyes, by applying kuhol (mascara). – Samia Halaby (M. Farhat, Samia Halaby: Five Decades of Painting and Innovation, London 2013).
Dominated by crimson, burgundy and magenta, Takheel I is punctuated by delicate accents of yellow and pale blue that flicker across the surface like scattered points of light. Its richly layered palette recalls the visual rhythms of Palestinian embroidery, while the dispersed marks also evoke the falling leaves of the forests of Vancouver Island. The painting therefore brings together two seemingly distant associations, Palestinian textile traditions and the landscapes of North America, without resolving them into a literal subject. Instead, they converge through colour, rhythm and pattern, becoming part of the visual language through which Halaby understands and constructs the world.
The title Takheel provides a key to this process of convergence. In Palestinian embroidery, takheel refers to the use of contrasting colours to accentuate and enliven a design, much as kuhol is used to accentuate the eyes. Halaby’s recognition that she had instinctively drawn upon this principle is significant precisely because the connection was not consciously intended. The painting initially emerged from a more immediate sensory memory of Vancouver Island, yet its colours subsequently revealed an underlying connection to the visual culture of her Palestinian heritage. Rather than reproducing tatreez directly, Halaby absorbs its principles into the structure of her abstraction. Cultural memory therefore operates beneath representation, surfacing through colour, rhythm and pattern, and thus creating an abstraction while allowing these associations to remain open to the viewer’s own memories and experiences.
This convergence and openness of interpretation is characteristic of Halaby’s mature approach to abstraction. Her paintings do not necessarily depict the places or experiences that inform them, instead, they translate the ways in which those experiences are perceived and remembered. In Takheel I, the dense field of crimson is animated by small variations of colour and mark, creating a complex surface whose pattern recalls her earlier Autumn Leaves and City Blocks series of 1982–83. By the 2000s, Halaby had moved increasingly away from stark geometric forms towards more organic structures and smaller, more painterly marks. She described this development as an engagement with the “more complex geometry of nature”, whose intricacies can become almost invisible through the repetition of patterns at a small scale (“Five Decades of Painting and Innovation: An Interview with Samia Halaby” in Jadaliyya, March 2015). Takheel I exemplifies this expanded conception of abstraction, in which accumulated marks and subtle shifts of colour transform sensory experience into visual form.
Takheel I was exhibited in Samia Halaby: New Paintings at Ayyam Gallery in 2013 and was subsequently included in Lasting Impressions: Samia Halaby, the artist’s major retrospective at Sharjah Art Museum in 2023–24. Its exhibition history situates the work within the broader trajectory of Halaby’s mature practice, in which abstraction becomes increasingly attuned to the complex geometries of nature, memory and lived experience. The painting originates from the prestigious Dalloul Collection, Beirut, founded by Dr Ramzi and Saeda Al Husseini Dalloul and now led by their son, Dr Basel Dalloul. With its roots in Palestine, the Dalloul family has maintained a particularly strong commitment to Palestinian art, reflected in the collection’s significant holdings of works by Palestinian artists. Spanning five decades, the collection reflects the artistic, political and cultural shifts of the Arab world and the family’s longstanding dedication to preserving and promoting Arab creativity.
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.
Halaby's work is held in major institutional collections, including 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; Institut du monde arabe, Paris; and the British Museum, London. In 2024, her work was featured for the first time at the 60th Venice Biennale, where she received a Special Mention from the Jury.
Dominated by crimson, burgundy and magenta, Takheel I is punctuated by delicate accents of yellow and pale blue that flicker across the surface like scattered points of light. Its richly layered palette recalls the visual rhythms of Palestinian embroidery, while the dispersed marks also evoke the falling leaves of the forests of Vancouver Island. The painting therefore brings together two seemingly distant associations, Palestinian textile traditions and the landscapes of North America, without resolving them into a literal subject. Instead, they converge through colour, rhythm and pattern, becoming part of the visual language through which Halaby understands and constructs the world.
The title Takheel provides a key to this process of convergence. In Palestinian embroidery, takheel refers to the use of contrasting colours to accentuate and enliven a design, much as kuhol is used to accentuate the eyes. Halaby’s recognition that she had instinctively drawn upon this principle is significant precisely because the connection was not consciously intended. The painting initially emerged from a more immediate sensory memory of Vancouver Island, yet its colours subsequently revealed an underlying connection to the visual culture of her Palestinian heritage. Rather than reproducing tatreez directly, Halaby absorbs its principles into the structure of her abstraction. Cultural memory therefore operates beneath representation, surfacing through colour, rhythm and pattern, and thus creating an abstraction while allowing these associations to remain open to the viewer’s own memories and experiences.
This convergence and openness of interpretation is characteristic of Halaby’s mature approach to abstraction. Her paintings do not necessarily depict the places or experiences that inform them, instead, they translate the ways in which those experiences are perceived and remembered. In Takheel I, the dense field of crimson is animated by small variations of colour and mark, creating a complex surface whose pattern recalls her earlier Autumn Leaves and City Blocks series of 1982–83. By the 2000s, Halaby had moved increasingly away from stark geometric forms towards more organic structures and smaller, more painterly marks. She described this development as an engagement with the “more complex geometry of nature”, whose intricacies can become almost invisible through the repetition of patterns at a small scale (“Five Decades of Painting and Innovation: An Interview with Samia Halaby” in Jadaliyya, March 2015). Takheel I exemplifies this expanded conception of abstraction, in which accumulated marks and subtle shifts of colour transform sensory experience into visual form.
Takheel I was exhibited in Samia Halaby: New Paintings at Ayyam Gallery in 2013 and was subsequently included in Lasting Impressions: Samia Halaby, the artist’s major retrospective at Sharjah Art Museum in 2023–24. Its exhibition history situates the work within the broader trajectory of Halaby’s mature practice, in which abstraction becomes increasingly attuned to the complex geometries of nature, memory and lived experience. The painting originates from the prestigious Dalloul Collection, Beirut, founded by Dr Ramzi and Saeda Al Husseini Dalloul and now led by their son, Dr Basel Dalloul. With its roots in Palestine, the Dalloul family has maintained a particularly strong commitment to Palestinian art, reflected in the collection’s significant holdings of works by Palestinian artists. Spanning five decades, the collection reflects the artistic, political and cultural shifts of the Arab world and the family’s longstanding dedication to preserving and promoting Arab creativity.
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.
Halaby's work is held in major institutional collections, including 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; Institut du monde arabe, Paris; and the British Museum, London. In 2024, her work was featured for the first time at the 60th Venice Biennale, where she received a Special Mention from the Jury.