Fahrelnissa Zeid: Selected Works

Overview

I myself, when I am painting, am always aware of a kind of communion with all living things, I mean with the universe as the sum total of the infinitely varied manifestations of being. I then cease to be myself in order to become part of an impersonal creative process that throws out these paintings much as an erupting volcano throws out rocks and lava.
–Fahrelnissa Zeid

A member of the avant-garde D-Group in Istanbul before entering the Paris art scene in the 1940s, Fahrelnissa Zeid was part of the École de Paris, a movement of abstraction that rejected academic methods and intellectual speculation. Zeid’s practice is marked by her monumental abstract works from the late 1940s–60s influenced by stained glass and mosaic design, at once conglomeration and defiance of geometric and perspectival logic. Works such as Break of the Atom and Vegetal Life (1962) demonstrate the artist’s distinctive geometric abstraction – constructions of organised chaos based in kaleidoscopic patterning and luminous colour. Consumed by eccentric experimentation, by the late 1960s Zeid began her rarely seen series ‘Paleocristálos’ also presented at SB12. Translucent casts of resin embedded with bones, the works conjure ideas of possession and transience, which would subsequently inform the portraits – grand cogitations on her subjects’ interiority – that would engross Zeid throughout the last decades of her life.


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 12