A solo exhibition of seminal works by the pioneering abstract painter, Samia Halaby, is being held in London at Ayyam Gallery. The show, Painting from the Sixties and Seventies, takes a selection from a diverse body of works in Halaby’s early oeuvre to give an insight into the artist’s creative development. All along, Halaby has maintained a single ambition: to capture reality through abstraction by establishing formal properties that allude to principles found in nature.
The period that this exhibition surveys was marked by a series of groundbreaking experiments that brought Halaby ever closer to her goal. In the show, these are exemplified by a number of pieces taken from the artist’s Geometric Still Life, Helixes and Cycloids, and Diagonal Flight series. They chart Halaby’s progress towards, and then advancement of, a materialist approach to abstraction that she describes as “visual conjugation”.
Born in Jerusalem in 1936 and resident in the US since 1951, Halaby has stood on the threshold between an Arabic visual culture steeped in tradition and the paradigm-shifting abstract expressionism of North America. Containing traces of Islamic geometric pattern and even of the landscape around Palestine, Halaby’s abstract paintings are the fruits of this unusual cross-pollination.
Samia Halaby, Slicer Waves (1973)
Samia Halaby, White Cross (1968)
Samia Halaby, Classic Half Sphere (1966)
by Thomas Allen
Painting from the Sixties and Seventies will run from May 18 to July 18, 2015 at Ayyam Gallery, 143 New Bond Street, 1st Floor, W1S 2TP, London
All images © Samia Halaby