Huguette Caland

Lisson is honoured to collaborate with the Estate of Huguette Caland on special projects, including Finding My Blue Sky, curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, and My Home, curated by Tarini Malik. A pioneer of abstract modernism, Lebanese artist Huguette Caland developed a multidisciplinary practice that challenged aesthetic and social norms of her time through abstract representations of the female body. Her drawings, paintings, textiles and sculptures render the figure in subtle lines and bursts of color that are simultaneously intimate, erotic and bold. In 1970, Caland moved to Paris from Beirut to pursue her artistic practice, a period that saw an exuberant focus on the body. It was there that she deepened the expressive and explicit power of line and color in her work, creating the Bribes de corps series. Foregrounding the body and its erotic expressions, the paintings from this series oscillate between figuration and abstraction, placing Caland within the broader discourse of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Also created in Paris, her Limousin and Granite series foreshadowed the next key turn in her style: a shift away from abstraction towards a greater sense of figuration. Her subsequent move to California solidified this interest and increasingly oriented her towards the poetics of line, most visibly in Homage to Pubic Hair, while also placing her within artistic circles alongside Larry Bell and Ed Moses. Caland’s mature practice saw a turn away from the body towards intricately constructed ‘landscapes’ that resemble the surfaces of textiles, while also evoking the techniques and approaches of her early drawings from the 1960s and 1970s.