Huguette Caland: Various works (1970–2011)

Overview

Huguette Caland’s work is notable for its wide-ranging style, material, subject matter and medium. Her rich and varied exploratory spans multiple disciplines and has been produced across multiple geographies. During the course of her life, Caland produced bodies of work thematising sensuality, desire, frivolity, touch, entanglement and other modes of ecstatic expression.

Unsettled Objects is presenting three of Caland’s iconic works from the 1970s, Maameltein (1970), Flash (1978) and a piece created in 1979 as part of her infamous ‘Bribes de Corps’ series; the latter two works were produced while the artist lived in Paris after leaving Beirut. In these sumptuous paintings, the contours of her carefully crafted compositions tread the line between figuration and abstraction (a primary means through which Caland expressed memory). The works also recall bodily forms or cityscapes as well as formal investigations of colour and two-dimensional surfaces. The paintings explore the late artist’s preoccupation with the female body and representation, staging encounters and conversations between the male and the female gaze. Her most recent work in the show, Rossinante Diptych (2011), is one of her final works that creates a forum where body and space explode into a multi-colour universe, making it look like it emerged from a utopian future.