Nima Sagharchi
Group Head
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Lot 18*
Samia Halaby(Palestine, born 1936)Untitled (from the Dome of the Rock series)
Amended
28 November 2017, 15:00 GMT
London, New Bond StreetSold for £22,500 inc. premium
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Noor Soussi
Head of Department
Samia Halaby (Palestine, born 1936)
Untitled (from the Dome of the Rock series)
oil on canvas
signed "S.A.HALABY" (lower right) in English, executed in 1981
89 x 125cm (35 1/16 x 49 3/16in).
oil on canvas
signed "S.A.HALABY" (lower right) in English, executed in 1981
89 x 125cm (35 1/16 x 49 3/16in).
Footnotes
Provenance:
Property from a private collection, London
Christie's, International Modern and Contemporary, 6 October 2010, lot 180
'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
Bonhams is delighted to present to you this magnificent painting by the renowned female abstract painter Samia Halaby; whose career has spanned 5 decades of painting and innovation. Her works have been exhibited throughout the Arab region and abroad and has been widely collected by international institutions such as the Guggenheim, the British Museum and MATHAF.
Samia Halaby was born in Jerusalem in 1936 where she spent the first few years of her life. It was not until her family moved to Jaffa that Halaby displayed signs of a budding artist and her aunt excitedly demanded she studied art. Her family were forced to leave Palestine in 1948 during the Nakba and fled to Beirut. In 1951, the family made the decision to immigrate to the United States at a time when abstract expressionism was popular but female abstract painters were marginalized.
Halaby received a Bachelor of Science in Design from the University of
Cincinnati in 1959 and in 1963 she obtained a Master's degree in Painting from Indiana University. It was there that she was exposed to Cubism and Russian Constructivism; two revolutionary early 20th century movements that would perhaps have the greatest impact on her life's work.
Prior to her first academic teaching position at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Halaby spent the summer visiting prominent art museums across Europe with her sister-in-law. In 1964, she held her first professional exhibition at Gima Gallery in Honolulu. That same year she transferred to the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri where she held a position of Assistant Professor. In the 1970s her career was marked by a number of milestones; Halaby was given the position of Associate Professor as the first full-time female faculty member at the Yale School of Art.
In 1966, Halaby travelled to the Middle East with a grant from the Kansas City Regional Council for Faculty Development. During her time there she sought out the great monuments of Islamic art and architecture and absorbed the ingenuity of their design. This trip expanded her knowledge of the roots of abstraction in Arab and Islamic art, making an immense impact on her. Halaby visited her homeland for the first time since 1948, there she was enchanted by the complexity of the Dome of the Rock's architecture. The artist recalls the experience as 'an awakening'. Her return to Palestine not only deeply affected the artist's takes on abstraction but it also strengthened her ties to the region after a long and painful absence.
This present lot is from a body of work Halaby created in the early 1980s; Halaby revisited the discoveries that she had made when first seeing the Dome of the Rock. Halaby allowed the rectangle of her paintings to create shapes which she then filled with shaded cylinders from the diagonal paintings or with texture imitating inlaid Arabic art.
These sections you see in this painting are subtly textured with colour and markings, the gradual shading of her compositions; an element that is radically different from her previous works that utilised flush areas that are composed of virtually invisible brushstrokes. Running in the opposite direction of the diagonals are larger squares that end beyond the picture plane and are painted with different degrees of texture. In some instances, scattered lines are used while in others, layers of paint seem to be finished with scumbled colour.
In the beginning, this use of textures fell within the boundaries of shapes as though following the precision of inlaid tiles. Halaby became found of the possibilities of this new facet of her painting style, which brought additional elements of energy and movement to the canvas. 'Eventually, texture began to charm', explains the artist. 'I began to think that the edges of things should betray what they are made of. So I began to allow textural marks to scatter over the entire painting in disregard of edge.' (Samia Halaby, exhibition catalogue Ayyam Gallery, 2008) This would prove to be an immense breakthrough for the artist, one that would alter her art forever.
Saleroom notices
Please note that the artist herself got in contact with us to let us know that the title of the work is "Wing Span with Joy it Glides" and the painting was exhibited in Oslo, Palestinske Kunstnere (Palestinian Artists), Kunstnernes Hus, 1981 Further note that the painting is acrylic on linen not oil on canvas.