Huguette Caland

Huguette Caland (1931–2019) was a pioneering Lebanese artist whose expansive practice defied aesthetic, cultural, and political conventions across decades and continents. A singular figure in modern art from the Arab world, Caland developed a deeply personal and radically joyful visual language that explored themes of eroticism, identity, and female agency with disarming frankness and wit.

Born into a prominent political family in Beirut, Caland did not begin making art in earnest until her early thirties, following the death of her father, Lebanon’s first post-independence president. She established a studio at her family home and enrolled in the Fine Arts program at the American University of Beirut. Her early work from this period reflects a growing confidence in the expressive potential of line—fluid, gestural, and often tinged with eroticism—as well as an irreverent approach to the body, desire, and self-representation. Drawing on intimate observation and the charged cultural atmosphere of 1960s Beirut, these compositions are striking in their originality: sensual yet restrained, minimal yet emotionally vivid. Already evident is a pursuit of personal and artistic freedom that would continue to shape her practice after 1970.

Over the following decades, Caland expanded her visual vocabulary across painting, sculpture, and textile, frequently collapsing boundaries between media, including a collection of caftans she designed for Pierre Cardin. Her relocation to California in the late 1980s marked a shift toward densely patterned, meditative compositions grounded in repetition and hand-drawn mark-making. These works evoke textile and architectural traditions while reflecting on intimacy, memory, and the passage of time. Yet throughout, she remained committed to the line—as poetic, structural, and bodily gesture—and to an ethos of art as a site of pleasure, autonomy, and connection.

Caland’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2025); the Arts Club of Chicago (2025); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2024), among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the 59th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere (2024); the 16th Biennale de Lyon (2022); Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021); and At the still point of the turning world, there is the dance at the Sursock Museum, Beirut (2019). Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Sharjah Art Foundation, among many others.

Salon 94 will present Caland’s work alongside her contemporaries Dorothy Salhab Kazemi and Afaf Zurayk at Independent 20th Century and a later gallery exhibition in October. These presentations are organized in collaboration with Carla Chammas.