Samia Halaby: Painting from the Sixties and Seventies

Painting from the Sixties and Seventies, a solo show by Samia Halaby (b.1936, Jerusalem), will be on display from the 18th of May at Ayyam Gallery in London.

The nearly two-dozen paintings on display will offer a rare look into her artistic development by charting several groundbreaking experiments across diverse bodies of work. The exhibition will mark the first time that such a seminal collection of Halaby’s paintings is shown in Europe.

Included in the solo show are examples from the artist’s Geometric Still Life (1966-70), Helixes and Cycloids (1971-75), and Diagonal Flight series (1974-79), which furthered her approach to the depiction of reality through abstraction by establishing formal properties that allude to principles found in nature. In doing so, the artist relies on form to stimulate sensory experiences, allowing viewers to recognise what is familiar in their immediate environment. The works on display demonstrate Halaby’s methodical investigation into a materialist treatment of art, which emphasises establishing aesthetic theories through scientifically informed experimentation.

Analysing properties of light as it shines on various objects, Halaby produced the Geometric Still Life series within a few years of graduating from the University of Indiana with a Master of Fine Art degree. Focusing intensely on how we perceive boundaries when representing three-dimensional objects, Halaby makes edges almost disappear treating them with accuracy but relying on formal properties such as local colour and shading to communicate depth and volume, while examining the importance of shadows. Over the course of several works, she arrived at an approach that she describes as ‘visual conjugation,’ through which reality is deconstructed to essential elements then reconstructed as a series of formal properties in abstraction. In the series that followed, Halaby focused on the implied movement, depth, and light that can be rendered through various techniques such as: the plotting of forms on graph paper; the interactions of colour; the potential for illusionistic space with gradations of light; and later the suggestion of infinite space with diagonal lines of various widths and lengths derived from the study of cylinders and the horizon.

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