My Home

Lisson is honored to stage the first solo exhibition of Huguette Caland’s work in New York for five years. Organized by independent curator and writer Tarini Malik, this presentation charts Caland’s groundbreaking career across five decades and three continents. Working in Beirut, Paris and Los Angeles, the artist displayed a conscious and liberated attitude toward the notion of home, finding new artistic impetus at every turn and constantly furthering her work, across different countries and cultures. Through drawing, painting, sculpture and writing, Caland developed her unique voice in every location she inhabited and every language she encountered, finding spiritual solace in depictions of places, mental spaces and her own sensual form, a “practice that attempted to undo the rootlessness of both her diaspora and her own body,” as Malik puts it.

Born in Beirut in 1931, Caland finally submitted to her passion for making art in the 1960s where she produced remarkable, abstracted, color-field paintings (such as the untitled works shown here from 1968), out of her home in the suburb of Kaslik. These early works demonstrate a sensitivity to form, color and surface that would come to structure her later engagement with the body. If these paintings hold form at a distance, her subsequent move to Paris in 1970, at the age of 39, marks a decisive shift toward a more intimate and embodied language.