Turn and Grow

‘[A] line can be a path for moving things – a path of motion such as an artery or a nerve or a roadway or a river. A shape can also be a field. An edge surrounds a shape which is an area containing material. The material and its changes affect the edge. It may expand or contract, or it may balloon or wrinkle.’
-Samia Halaby, in ‘Growing Shapes, H.T.T.B.F.T: Press New York, 1996’

With a prolific career extending over 60 years, Samia Halaby is one of the most important abstract painters from the Middle East and also considered a trailblazer across contemporary abstract art internationally. The present work ‘Turn and Grow’ by Halaby is a seminal piece from her ‘Growing Shapes and Centers of Energy’ series produced between 1984-1992 which marks the artist’s exploration into nature’s processes, experimentation of the picture plane and represents one of her most liberating painterly practices for its interdisciplinary process.
Pulsating shapes and lines became, as Halaby states ‘dynamic and alive, and [have] the power to cut, intersect, reshape and bring to being new sets of shapes’ that appear parallel to Malevich’s notions of abstraction and Tatlin’s Constructivist views, merging elements of both West and Eastern approaches to space and shape. In the early 1900s, Tatlin had sailed through the Mediterranean, spending time in Egypt, Syria and the Levant, where he was exposed to Islamic architectural monuments and further connecting the links between Western art into Islamic and Arab art.
Works of this period are extremely diverse and layered for their visual opulence, teeming with unrestrained energy and dense layers. The artist began this series by placing the work directly on walls of her studio, and superimposes them over scattered rectangles of staples canvases hung at various angles. In these works, both shape and line extend off at all directions, surpassing the borders.
While making her Growing Shapes series, Halaby became interested in the potential of using a computer as a means of painting. Just one year before she painted ‘Turn and Grow’, Halaby purchased an Amiga and began teaching herself computer programming and exploration into her kinetic works, which point to the evolution of shapes as they ‘fluctuate, stretch, compress, disappear, reappear, fade and make sounds,’ that captures in real time and recreates specific sensations or ‘centers of attraction.’ This was inspired by the people’s streets of NY, Canal St and its rhythms, 14th Street with its working class shoppers and paths of political demonstrations.
Born in Jerusalem, and growing up in Jaffa, Halaby moved to the United States in 1951 following the 1948 Nakba. In 1972, Halaby took a position at Yale School of Art, where eventually she became the first full-time woman faculty member in the department. Today, Halaby continues to push the threshold of her practice in her New York studio she has worked from since 1976, with an expansive oeuvre in abstraction articulated through her paintings, drawings, silk-screen prints, stone lithographs, computer-generated kinetic works and hanging sculptures. Her engagement in Islamic abstraction is intertwined with modern art movements of the West. As prominent in her artistic practice, she is also a notable teacher and scholar, her book “Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Paintings and Sculpture in the Second Half of the 20th Century” is a distinguished text for Palestinian art history.
In 1966 while teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute, Halaby travelled to Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Palestine to study the architectural landmarks, Islamic architecture and heritage sites, returning with renewed appreciation. While her work is informed by the polychromatic mosaics, geometry and patterns of the Arab world, she is well informed by a Western art history focus and pays close attention to the Russian avant-garde art movement and the German Bauhaus school.
Halaby has held many solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and her paintings are held in several museum collections, including The British Museum, London; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; The Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit; and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman, among others.