SAMIA HALABY

Abstract in Motion

Sfeir-Semler downtown

Opening August 21st, 2025, at 5:00 PM

Samia Halaby (b.1936 in Jerusalem) is a Palestinian-American artist and scholar living and working in New York. She is a painter who was educated in the 1950s in the American Midwest, at a time when abstract expressionism was popular. While her work is very much in line with American art movements she evolved with, it is consciously enriched by the history of pictorial expression worldwide. Her oeuvre is today central to the study of abstraction within both global and Arabic visual language.

The solo show at Sfeir-Semler Beirut downtown dedicated to Samia Halaby is presented as an homage to the doyenne of our roster of artists, with paintings on canvas from the 1980s to 2025, accompanied by her seminal digital works. In 1986 Halaby started to program kinetic paintings on an amiga computer. These experimentations with computer-generated visuals naturally evolved into the Kinetic Painting Program, that transformed the keyboard of her PC into a live digital painting instrument, which she uses for her performances.

Reflecting on her oeuvre, Jean-Marc Prevost writes: “The celebration of the gallery’s 40th anniversary offers a special opportunity to highlight Samia Halaby’s work. With her innovative approach to abstraction, she consistently explored new modes of expression. As early as the 1980s, she moved away from the restrictive framework of the canvas to explore digital art through her Kinetic Paintings. Their forms, sounds, colors, and rhythms reflect the present moment, social realities, and technological revolutions that have transformed our relationship to space, forcing us to reposition ourselves in radically different ways.

“The single stationary point of view was replaced by multiple, moving points of view.”
“The picture plane and rectilinear shape remained as forms, but the window space was replaced by the infinity relative space of a flat ground.”[1]

Her interest in light and color—ranging from the painting of the Italian Renaissance to the Impressionists, whom she discovered during her travels—is connected to her engagement with reality and a sense of identity. One only needs to consider the evocative titles of some of her works, such as I found me growing in an old olive tree (2005) or For Niihau from Palestine (1985). She does not depict nature, but expresses its energy, its transformation—and evokes her Palestinian roots when she refers to olive trees. She asserts a political dimension of art when drawing connections between Native Hawaiians and Palestine.

Her recent paintings, featured in the exhibition and resonating with the parallel exhibition The Shade, invite us to reimagine the world—to go beyond obscured spaces, as suggested by the titles of the works”.

[1] Samia Halaby, Centers of Energy, p. 158