Samia A. Halaby

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner's father in the late 1960s 
Thence by Descent 

Kansas City, Kansas City Art Institute, Art of Two Cities, September 1965 - August 1966 

Condition: This work is in very good condition. Upon closer inspection, a pinhole-sized paint chip can be noticed on the left central axis edge. A faint surface discolouration to the lower centre and right section of the canvas, inherent to the artist's choice of medium and creative process. No signs of restoration under the UV light. Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is accurate, with the blues tending towards a darker hue than in the illustration.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Internationally acclaimed abstract painter Samia Halaby has had a significant impact on how we perceive contemporary Arab art today. Ranging from large canvases that explore the colour planes of geometric and helix constructions to her abstract assemblages that exude movement, her practice is one of radical experimentation and creative urgency that arrives at ‘a visual language that reflects reality’. (Samia Halaby cited in: Five Decades of Painting and Innovation, London, 2014, p.16)

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Halaby was twelve when her family were driven out of their home in Jaffa after the occupation of Palestine in 1948.  Her family sought refuge in Lebanon, and then later in Cincinnati, Ohio. After completing her MFA at Indiana University in Bloomington, Halaby began lecturing at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1964, the same year that bore the work Marca Relli One. During her employment she carried out faculty research on the geometric abstraction of Islamic art and architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean, a theme that repeatedly emerges in her work. Halaby is particularly interested in the materialist principles of abstraction and how reality is represented through form, an influence derived from the abstract movements of the Russian Constructivists, combined with examples of traditional Arabic art and Islamic architecture. She instills into her work the belief that new approaches to painting can change the ways of how we perceive and process works of art, both within the field of aesthetics but also as a method of social and technological advancement. This notion has led to her experimentation with drawing, printmaking, computer-based kinetic art and free-from-the-stretcher painting.

From the 1960s until the late 1980s, Halaby taught at universities throughout the United States. Halaby became the first full-time female professor at the Yale School of Art, teaching there for ten years until 1982. Despite having promised her a permanent position, Yale failed to renew her contract — an action which Halaby believes had to do with her gender and her growing political activism. This prompted her move to New York in the 1970s which the artist felt played a major role in shaping her perception of politics, religion, social structure and gender equality in the world. The artist describes this struggle: “but in those days, being female and then, on top of that, being Palestinian, made things extremely difficult” (the artist, in conversation with Erica Schwiegershausen for the New York Magazine, 2013).

Throughout her body of work, Halaby is one of those rare exiled Arab artists who do not portray the severe political turmoil of her country, nor the lack of freedom of speech endured by her people. Her large canvases are extremely neutral. Perhaps they seek an inner peace as they draw upon an explosion of abstract colours that sometimes suggest a certain playfulness, despite the tragic status of 'refugee' with which she was labelled during her early years. The passion and simplicity of her art precedes the artist, rather than the trauma that led to her displacement at a young age.

Sotheby’s is delighted to offer four rare works from Halaby’s earliest period of artistic exploration, including Marca Relli One, A Cylinder Series, and two works on paper.

Marca Relli One, 1964, is one of the artist’s most primitive works to appear at auction. The work’s title pays homage to Halaby’s predecessor, Conrad Marca-Relli, a Boston-born painter and sculptor who belonged to the early generation of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist artists. Marca-Relli’s large-scale collage paintings took their inspiration from the human form to produce abstract works of interlacing geometric shapes, themes that would be prominent in much of Halaby’s work. Unseen until now, Marca Relli One, is a testimonial to the reduction of traditional perspective, comparable to Malevich’s experiments of the early 1900s where he considered landscapes from an aerial view as a new way of seeing, a perspective that would later lay the foundations of the Suprematist principles of abstraction. Halaby directed her study to organic forms and fields of colour fused together by thin, acute lines and sectional brush strokes. To contrast the fundamentally impenetrable geometric shapes that Malevich would have employed to give variations in depth, Halaby instead adopts flat, bright colours to achieve a sense of nonlinear depth.

The Cylinder Series and Untitled (two paper studies) set the tone for what was to become Halaby’s iconic three-dimensional paintings in the late 1960s. The works demonstrate a clear shift towards geometry. Through a series of “cylinder” compositions, she concluded that volume of colour affects the illusion of depth. With these discoveries Halaby abandoned the use of three-dimensional features as a starting point for her paintings, and instead began to plot paintings on graph paper before transferring them onto canvas. This allowed for a different approach to depicting volume and eventually led to the artist’s investigation of strong architectural representations and movement derived from Islamic art, architecture and calligraphy, in which infinite space and time is communicated through a repetition of forms. This ingenuity is apparent in all four works, as they reiterate Halaby’s reference to Islamic art through "a sense of numbers and rhythms, duplicating principles of nature – not its appearance. She says, ‘My paintings are therefore an image of nature. They expose what the mind comprehends’ (the artist cited in: Indiana Alumni Magazine, 1980)".