“Art is not holy and
is not above other production.”
Samia Halaby
Samia Halaby
The Palestinian born New York based abstract artist Samia Halaby is very much the pragmatist. As
she told the New
York Magazine’s Erica Schwiegershausen “I don’t have
patience with the postmodern philosophers because I’m a person who wants to
deal with concrete things. I believe what I see is real, and I want to paint
about it.”
Halaby also rejects the concept that art is self expression,
as she says “The stuff comes out of me, but it’s not about me. Our brain is a
storehouse of all of the things we’ve seen, and as we process them, we discern
the general principles that govern them. Abstraction, being about general
principles, can remind you of many sets of things that share the same
principles. Abstract paintings are not about specific objects.”
At the age of 12 Halaby along with her family were forced to
leave their home in Jaffa during the fighting there as part of the creation of
the state of Israel. After three years in Beirut the family moved to the
Midwestern United States. After graduated from
Indiana University with a Masters in Fine Art Halaby embarked on her
career as an artist by becoming a teacher. As she says in her biography “Teaching
was then the only way to earn money if your college degree was in the arts.”
After 18 years in exile Halaby was able to return to the
Arab world for the first time which had a marked influence upon her work that
had mostly been influence by the mid 20th Century European and American abstract
movements. As she has said “I went back in 1966 and I visited the Dome of the
Rock, which is one of the most amazing architectural monuments in the world.
It’s a mosque, and it influenced my work enormously. I saw large, very simple
marble inlays of geometric art. The inlays were at least twelve to fourteen
feet tall, and some were just a few squares arranged with a black outline.
Medieval Arabic art is very much based on symmetry: There’s a repeating pattern
with chosen parts represented in a rectangle. So I came back and decided to let
the rectangle of the painting determine what I do.”
Halaby has also been active in issues regarding the land of her
birth. As she says “I’m very much an activist for Palestine, and I’m a leftist
— the two seem to go together. The experience of
being evicted from Palestine and losing everything was a very painful one...There’s
a deep pain in every Palestinian about it, I think.”
But she doesn’t see herself as a Palestinian artist per se. “As
I see it, Palestine need not be in my painting and should not be in my
painting. If Arab art and Palestine is in some paintings, that’s because it’s
part of my past and will come through as part of my experiences in the real
world. But if I’m a painter, I should be a painter trying to do paintings that
are the most advanced possible,” she
has remarked.
Halaby’s current exhibition Painting
from the Sixties and Seventies is on show at Ayyam’s London
Gallery until the 18th of July.
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