Huguette Caland, Dorothy Salhab Kazemi, and Afaf Zurayk

Three artists from Lebanon—Huguette Caland (1931–2019), Dorothy Salhab Kazemi (1933–1990), and Afaf Zurayk (b. 1948)—each offered singular contributions to modernism, shaped by their personal histories and the upheavals of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) felt throughout the region. Their practices were each deeply personal and profoundly outward-looking, preparing the ground for new categorizations of abstraction across media.

Kazemi’s sculptural vessels of the mid-1970s embody both formation and deformation in their making. High-fired stoneware, wheel-thrown then manipulated by hand, their bulges, twists, and eruptions follow and form organic contours. These are not functional vessels but bodies in transformation—part anatomical, part botanical—where containment itself seems unstable. The void within each form is as vital as its surface; the interior volume holds memory just as powerfully as the clay walls shaped by Kazemi’s hand. Her work demonstrates how material carries its own poetics, revealing clay as a medium of both persistence and fragility, foretelling a country on the cusp of war.

Caland began painting later in life, at the age of 33, following the death of her parents and the establishment of her own family with her husband Paul Caland. In 1964, she enrolled in classes at the American University in Beirut and quickly emerged as a distinctive artistic voice. Her early paintings from the 1960s carry a bold chromaticism and compositional directness that would become central to her later practice. In 1970, Caland left Lebanon for Paris, a move that marked both personal independence and a shift in her artistic trajectory. In her paintings, Bribes de corps (1973) and Accroupie (1979), the playful sensuality of her earlier works gives way to a radical language of fragmentation. Curved fields of color suggest bodies without fixing them, while the blank spaces between painted forms become as charged as the painted areas themselves.

In Zurayk’s work, innumerable layers of translucent pigment accumulate slowly across the canvases to create forms that hover between emergence and dissolution. These works approach memory not as a fixed image but as a shifting presence, recorded in the very process of painting. Fields of color open and recede like breath, turning the surface into a register of time. Here, the void is not blankness but a temporal clearing—an interval in which recollection and forgetting overlap. If Caland’s voids are structural and Kazemi’s are volumetric, Zurayk’s are temporal, spaces where meaning flickers in and out of view.

This presentation is organized in collaboration with Carla Chammas

For more information, please contact Andrew Blackley (andrew@salon94.com)