Huguette Caland: Various Works (1968-2012)

Overview

Huguette Caland’s work is notable for its wide-ranging style, material, subject matter and medium, an exploratory that extends to a practice spanning disciplines and geography. Coming of age in post-independence Lebanon, she moved to Paris in 1970. She lived and worked there for 17 years before a stint in New York and an extended period in Venice, California, where she settled in 1987 and established her own studio. Throughout her career, Caland has produced bodies of work thematising sensuality, desire, frivolity, touch, entanglement and other modes of ecstatic expression.

For SB14, Caland’s presentation focuses primarily on works from the 1970s, when the artist lived in Paris. In a number of colour-saturated paintings, the contours of her carefully crafted compositions walk the line between figuration and abstraction, recalling bodily forms or cityscapes as well as formal investigations of colour and two-dimensional surfaces. In another group of paintings, the artist explores her preoccupation with the female body and representation, staging encounters and conversations between the male and the female gaze. Also on view are a number of the artist’s kaftans created with French designer Pierre Cardin as well as richly detailed smocks conceived by Caland. These functional works conceal the female body while providing a flowing, fabric tableau activated by its movement.