Ayyam Gallery, Dubai (Al Quoz) presents Samia Halaby: Five Decades of Painting and Innovation, the first major retrospective to be organized for the renowned artist. Curated by art historian Maymanah Farhat, this comprehensive survey will feature over fifty works of art, representing every period of the artist’s oeuvre and the many creative experiments and breakthroughs that have resulted.

Inspired by the logic of the artist’s recently rereleased eponymous monograph, Five Decades of Painting and Innovation highlights Halaby’s critical pursuit of furthering abstraction and its rootedness in materialist philosophy, and thus includes paintings, drawings, prints, computer-generated kinetic works, and hanging sculptures. Visible in such varied works as Third Spiral (1970), Blue Trap in a Railroad Station (1977), Worldwide Intifada (1989), and Pyramid (2011) is the artist’s radical approach to the historical progression of formalism in international art, which, she has argued and demonstrated, should parallel the technological advancement of mankind, including the general development of societies, while reflecting principles found in nature. Central to this theoretical treatment are nonobjective strategies that attempt to examine and communicate physical properties as they are experienced in reality, namely the relationships of light and color that create depth, volume, and movement, the numbers and rhythms constituting the growth of forms, and the continuous state of motion, or space and time, defining the fourth dimension. What this has meant is that each successive series of painting over the span of fifty years of work has served as the site of observation, scientifically-informed analysis, and an engagement with pre-modern forms of abstraction, mainly Islamic art, alongside a reconsideration of the lessons of seminal modern art movements—from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism.

Since the 1960s, Halaby has worked and exhibited throughout the United States, where she eventually settled in New York in 1972 while teaching at the Yale School of Art. The artist’s retrospective will chronicle the early phases of her career, which were spent in the American Midwest where she studied under several notable artists, while also mapping the ways in which the artistic and political happenings of New York have informed her practice to this day. Halaby’s importance as a pioneer of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world will also feature prominently, as she has remained a significant figure in the region’s art scene through numerous exhibitions, institutional collections, teaching residencies, and independent scholarship.

The artist’s regular participation in local art scenes, from Damascus to Dubai, which began early on in her career, has simultaneously led to profound intellectual ties and friendships with a wide range of Arab artists, writers, and activists—exchanges that have thrived amidst the many variables of regional culture while nurturing her experiments and extending her influence.

-Ayyam Gallery

Image: © Samia Halaby
Third Spiral with Dark Center
1970
Oil on canvas
167.5 x 167.5cm