“I fell in love with Autumn leaves. I collects ed thousands and pressed them between pages until all my books were full. (…) I also cut rectangles out of hundreds of them searching for a perfect painting. Eventually, it dawned on me that a rectangular fragment is a dead extraction unable to reveal how it came to be. In order to capture the beauty of the leaf, I had to imitate its growth, not its appearance. I wanted to grow a painting just as a leaf grew. (…) Moreover. these shapes resembled the truncated rectangles in city blocks and the pentagonal land shapes between roads and highways, which themselves reveal growth. That growth is the development of mankind as much as it is the development of plants. Rectangles opening at a corner to become imperfect pentagons became the formal principle of the Autumn Leaves and City blocks series.”
Samia Halaby was born in 1936 in Jerusalem and moved to New York in the 1970s. She is an artist, activist and academic, known for her engagement in the Palestinian cause. During the Palestinian exodus of 1948, her family was constrained to leave for Beyrouth, before settling down in Cincinnati in 1951. In the States, Halaby began her artistic training and exhibited some of her works as early as in the 1960s. She also taught art for more than 20 years in various American universities, including ten years in Yale School of Art as the first female Associate Professor. Her work was featured in many of the most illustrious cultural institutions in the world, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum in London, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the Mathaf in Doha.
Halaby is a major figure of the 21st century’s abstractionist art movement. Her paintings can be recognized through their geoMetricas l compositions and bright colours, declined according to different periods of experimentation. The present painting is part of a short series within Halaby’s practice, spanning from 1982 to 1983, known as Autumn Leaves and City Blocks. Inspired by the dramatic seasons of Connecticut and their lively yellows, oranges, and reds, and fascinated by the way urban landscapes complicate human geometry, she started to use a palette knife over brushes to reproduce the edges created by bridges over roads and rivers. But what really distinguished this new series was its sense of ‘motion in reality’, illustrating Halaby’s increasing interest for the growth of organic elements. Employing uneven geoMetricas l shapes, she attempted to emulate the intricate process of natural formation and expansion, whereby shapes and lights are submitted to external forces and infinite motion.
Bibliography:
Maymanah Farhat, Samia Halaby, Five Decades of Painting and Innovation, New York, 2014.