HUGUETTE CALAND: declare the Lebanese artist in the midst of the conflict | Culture | EUROtoday

Sometimes coincidences make artwork go to time to their appointment with historical past. The exhibition HUGUETTE CALAND. A LIFE IN A FEW LINESinaugurated on Tuesday morning on the Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid, which goals They haven’t even been in a position to attain the Madrid heart from Lebanon due to the conflict state of affairs during which the realm is immersed.

“The work is partly incomplete,” defined the police station, Hannah Feldman, a professor of up to date artwork on the University of Pennsylvania, graduated in Harvard and Dr. specialised in decolonization in artwork. “About thirty pieces have not been able to arrive because at the time of obtaining transfer permits from Lebanon, the fire was not in force,” he defined. The works have been changed by others, however for Feldman, American, the state of affairs is worrying at a time “when the president of my country wants to do an ethnic cleaning in Gaza and Lebanon’s airspace is taken by Israel,” he denounced .

The exhibition is immense. Open to the general public from Wednesday, February 19 to August 25, it’s the first nice retrospective devoted to the Lebanese in Europe. It consists of greater than 300 works by Caland (1931-2019) distributed in 12 rooms, in all codecs, though the principle factor is portray. “A painting full of meat and that is a deep dialogue with the traditions of the Middle East”, within the phrases of Manuel Segade, director of Reina Sofía, who identified that such an exhibition is “necessary to make memory of contemporary art in the region in the region , and widen the historical understanding of the position of women in the Middle East since the sixties. ” Although the exposure was not designed (it began to gestate years ago by the previous director, Manuel Borja-Villel) in this concrete geopolitical context, his relevance cannot be denied, especially taking into account the political vocation that Caland always had: ” She mentioned that her medium was not portray or sculpture, however life itself; Art and life, blended, as artwork and politics, in all his work, ”mentioned Feldman Commissioner.

“Huguette Caland always said that art and politics are inseparable,” mentioned Dirk Luckow, director of the DeichTorhallen of Hamburg, the establishment with which Queen Sofia has created this exhibition and the place the works will depart in October. “From the female body and its importance in art and politics, yours is a multifaceted work that mixes the political with the grotesque, solemn with the vital, and who speaks of someone who always sought with all its might to break with the conventions ”.

The solely baby who was later the primary president of the Lebanese Republic, Bechara El Khoury, Caland’s life was fascinating and handed between Beirut, Los Angeles and Paris. “He is known for works on which he focuses on his own body, and has emphasized the eroticism of some of his paintings, but his work went further: he claimed feminine freedom in all its forms, also as a creator,” Feldman held. “For Caland, the figure of the woman was a great concern. Especially the Palestinian women, ”actually, in 1969 he was co -founder of INAASH,“ an NGO that, until today, continues to help Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon, ”defined the commissioner, who has devoted 4 years of investigation between California, the Emirate of Sharjah, Beirut and Los Angeles to hold out the exhibition.

The exhibition, chronological, covers from the sixties to 2000, 5 a long time represented in additional than 300 works distributed by an immense house that covers a dozen rooms of the Madrid museum. From its first image, the just about monochrome and reddish Red solar / Cancerwhich he created after his father’s demise due to this illness, till his most experimental side within the nineties, going via those that could also be his most well-known creations, the Bodies (Bodies of our bodies), bigger work, vivid colours and summary shapes, typically rounded, that transmit a sensation of carnality and caress.

The fact is that in such a large retrospective there may be house for all the pieces: works influenced by the Lebanese civil conflict (from 1975 to 1990 and during which 150,000 individuals died), which impressed cadres of pastel tones during which faces are crowded, torsos mutilated, hanging appendices. Works that flip to pastel tones within the eighties, pure ink abstractions on Japanese paper, collages With newspapers or images, clothes nourtapestries, work written in notebooks, a moviepaper sketches … All this exhibits of the character unobornably eclectic and in perpetual aesthetic redefinition for greater than 5 a long time, during which, as well as, the types of sexuality have gotten extra specific over time, when its grew incessant fee of manufacturing.

“Until now, the West has been unable to see the complexity of his work,” Feldman closed this morning. “His art was based on reaching our identity through others, social conventions, vulnerable minorities for gender or nationality, money, love, and, in the end, aging and mortality,” he defined. A LIFE IN A FEW LINESby the best way, it’s a phrase of her work, however in actuality she was devoted to her husband, Paul; The Huguette Caland is unimaginable for him to slot in so little house.