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Lot Essay
Captivating in its contrasting yet harmonious colour palette, Christie's is delighted to be offering the present work painted by the celebrated Lebanese artist Saliba Douaihy from a Private American Collection. Having met the artist through common friends in Paris in 1965, the present owner was mesmerised by the work and has kept it in their collection ever since.
Born in 1912 in the picturesque town of Ehden in the Northern mountains of Lebanon, Douaihy's early passion for the arts arose as a result of his many visits to the churches in his hometown. Encouraged at an early age to develop his talent, Douaihy worked under the apprenticeship of well-established painter Habib Srour, whereby Saliba developed his depictions of religious scenes. Douaihy set about creating his own distinctive style, which was inspired by his native country's landscapes, rustic villages and pastel hues of architecture. As such, his early works delicately combined figurative art with subtle touches of Minimalism and revealed his stylistic consonances with European traditions of art.
In the 1950s Douaihy immigrated to New York and having been exposed to the burgeoning art scene, particularly the Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt, he moved away from his earlier academic style and began his much sought after series depicting abstract minimalist paintings. At the end of the 1950s, his works depicted flat monochromatic forms, refined straight lines and hard edges, anticipating the most successful era of his celebrated career. Until he passed away in 1994, Douaihy continued to thrive at reaching an absolute simplification of both form and colour. He developed his own ideas of infinite space whereby his signature style became the interlinking of asymmetrical areas using few opposing yet complementary colours exploring the constant interaction between the dominant asymmetrical shapes of his paintings and the slender shafts of colours that intersect or border them.
In the present enchanting example, the composition is dominated by an expanse of vibrant blue that references the charming Mediterranean Sea harking back to Douaihy's nostalgic recollections of the Lebanese landscapes that he often visited and remained a recurrent theme throughout his oeuvre. The artist's use of saturated shades of light and dark yellow, red and brown equally reference the Lebanese sand and sky. In true Douaihy form, the use of these flat colours impart a sense of two-dimensionality to the painting lacking of any sort of perspective, yet the short and sharp bursts of colours suggest depth and an affinity for landscape painting that is reminiscent of his earlier works. These colours are resplendent with life, freshness and warmth and achieve an overwhelming sense of harmony through form, rendering the work a fantastic example from the artist's most sought after and most successful period.
Since the mid-1960s, Saliba's works have been exhibited in many institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and are featured in public and private collections around the world including Mathaf in Doha. His celebrated solo exhibition opened at the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1978, from which a comparable work Mediterranean painted in 1960 was offered at Christie's Dubai in April 2012, showing the development of the artist's determination to play with abstraction and colour.
Born in 1912 in the picturesque town of Ehden in the Northern mountains of Lebanon, Douaihy's early passion for the arts arose as a result of his many visits to the churches in his hometown. Encouraged at an early age to develop his talent, Douaihy worked under the apprenticeship of well-established painter Habib Srour, whereby Saliba developed his depictions of religious scenes. Douaihy set about creating his own distinctive style, which was inspired by his native country's landscapes, rustic villages and pastel hues of architecture. As such, his early works delicately combined figurative art with subtle touches of Minimalism and revealed his stylistic consonances with European traditions of art.
In the 1950s Douaihy immigrated to New York and having been exposed to the burgeoning art scene, particularly the Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt, he moved away from his earlier academic style and began his much sought after series depicting abstract minimalist paintings. At the end of the 1950s, his works depicted flat monochromatic forms, refined straight lines and hard edges, anticipating the most successful era of his celebrated career. Until he passed away in 1994, Douaihy continued to thrive at reaching an absolute simplification of both form and colour. He developed his own ideas of infinite space whereby his signature style became the interlinking of asymmetrical areas using few opposing yet complementary colours exploring the constant interaction between the dominant asymmetrical shapes of his paintings and the slender shafts of colours that intersect or border them.
In the present enchanting example, the composition is dominated by an expanse of vibrant blue that references the charming Mediterranean Sea harking back to Douaihy's nostalgic recollections of the Lebanese landscapes that he often visited and remained a recurrent theme throughout his oeuvre. The artist's use of saturated shades of light and dark yellow, red and brown equally reference the Lebanese sand and sky. In true Douaihy form, the use of these flat colours impart a sense of two-dimensionality to the painting lacking of any sort of perspective, yet the short and sharp bursts of colours suggest depth and an affinity for landscape painting that is reminiscent of his earlier works. These colours are resplendent with life, freshness and warmth and achieve an overwhelming sense of harmony through form, rendering the work a fantastic example from the artist's most sought after and most successful period.
Since the mid-1960s, Saliba's works have been exhibited in many institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and are featured in public and private collections around the world including Mathaf in Doha. His celebrated solo exhibition opened at the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1978, from which a comparable work Mediterranean painted in 1960 was offered at Christie's Dubai in April 2012, showing the development of the artist's determination to play with abstraction and colour.