New Nadia Saikali exhibition demonstrates Beirut’s role as a hub for abstract art in the 1970s and 1980s

For Nadia Saikali, abstraction is akin to dancing on the canvas.

The Lebanese artist, who was born in 1936, has often expressed this approach in past interviews, saying the mindset probably stems from the ballet lessons she took as a child.

Her 1986 painting, titled Empreinte Autoportrait Ile Sanctuaire, is a prime example of this idiosyncrasy. Handprints and footprints move across the canvas with a fevered dynamism that is superimposed on a serene strata of blues. It isn’t difficult to imagine that the canvas once lay on the ground of Saikali’s studio, her private dance floor of sorts.

The piece is now being featured in Nadia Saikali and Her Contemporaries, an exhibition at Sharjah’s Maraya Art Centre. The exhibition seeks to give Saikali a spotlight that is perhaps long overdue. It aims to show the depth and breadth of an artist who can safely be classified as a pioneer of abstract art in the region.

The exhibition, running until July 13, is organised in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation and marks the institution's first time in the space since 2018. It brings together artworks by Saikali that go back to the 1960s. Her works range across a variety of mediums and styles, so much so that they may easily be mistaken as the output of several artists. While most of the works come from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, there are several pieces from the Habbal Collection in Dubai as well.

Saikali’s early paintings are gestural in nature. The aptly named Gesture, painted in 1960, features large arcing strokes against a white background. Bull, painted in the 1960s, has a similar energy, though teetering towards a more figurative composition. By the following decade, however, the works begin to drastically vary, and show Saikali’s infatuation with lines.

Her Vertical Rhythm series features clustered lines painted in earth tones and with a mesmerising quality. In contrast, an untitled work, also from the 1970s, bears horizontal lines of molten hues that stack towards an evident horizon. Her interest in lines was not limited to the canvas, however, as she took her studies to other mediums, including a light sculpture named Geodesic Landscape.

The works continued to change in the following two decades, first with pieces from the 1980s, such as Empreinte Autoportrait Ile Sanctuaire, before Saikali began to suggest an interest in landscapes, rendering natural scenes with her sensibilities of abstraction.

The paintings are lined at the end of the gallery space in a somewhat chronological order. They are displayed on a wall that is painted blue, clearly separating Saikali’s works from the surrounding trove of abstract works. This is where the second half of the exhibition’s title comes in. The works are by contemporaries of Saikali, all of whom are women. The artists come across from the Arab world, but all have a connection to Beirut, Saikali’s hometown.

“Originally, the idea was to give Saikali a solo exhibition,” says Suheyla Takesh, who curated the exhibition with Remi Homs. “Then, we thought of this idea of expanding the conversation to other artists practicing in Lebanon at the time.”

These included renowned figures like Saloua Raouda Choucair, Huguette Caland, Etel Adnan and Helen Khal. However, as the curators delved deeper into their research, they discovered several other artists who were practicing in Beirut in the latter half of the 20th century. These included Kuwaiti artist Munira Al-Kazi, Iraqi artist Madiha Umar, Jordanian artist Mona Saudi, Syrian artist Asma Fayoumi, and Palestinian artist Maliheh Afnan.

“First, we gathered works from the collection from a group of Lebanese artists. But the conversation kept expanding to these other figures,” Takesh says. “We’d add little notes of what the connection was with that artist to Beirut. There were those who married a Lebanese individual and started a family in Beirut. There were those who fled the Nakba in 1948. Those who went there to study in a Lebanese institution. The way that these artists ended up in Beirut was very diverse.”

As such, Beirut soon became the inadvertent star of the exhibition, which shows how the city was a regional hub for several female Arab artists. Though all the artists had a keen sense for abstraction, their works are nonetheless distinct. And some of them draw from concrete objects in their everyday life.

In her Human Forms series, for instance, Afaf Zurayk presents an oil painting of bulbous copper-hued shapes, which were really inspired by the form of the human hand. In her 1968 painting Two Diagonals, Samia Halaby depicts two pipes from her studio with three dimensional efficacy. Seta Manoukian, meanwhile, presents a crumpled landscape in an oil painting that was really inspired by her bedsheets.

Of course, the genius of all these works is that their inspirations have been obscured, evoking more than they would have had they been depicted in a realist fashion.

“We found many press cuts and photographs showing that the artists were not only in the same in the same city at the same time, but also had conversation, exhibited together, wrote poetry together,” Homs says. One example is Rosevart Sisserian, whose 1974 painting Pixels is being exhibited. When going through the list of students at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, where Saikali studied in the 1950s and then taught between 1962 and 1974, the curators discovered that Sisserian was one of the academy’s students the year she produced the painting. “That was an incredible discovery,” Homs says. “To see that not only she was, you know, in the same city at the time, but they exhibited together and talked about abstraction together.”

While the network of artists was a happy development to the exhibition, Homs says the show is also keen on shedding light on Saikali as a person and an artist. Her quotes are decked in several walls around the exhibition space, which gives insight into her practice and her artistic philosophies with a poetic grace with words.

“She was kind of an innate poet, even if she didn’t identity as one,” Takes says. “I also credit that to her upbringing. We were reading about how when she was growing up, she was encouraged by her family to explore ceramics and piano and dance, and she was trained ballerina.”

Archival materials, including old newspaper articles and family photographs, offer a glimpse into this upbringing, offering a more personal look at her artistic life. Among the photographs is one which shows the artist as a child in ballet class.

Takesh and Homs says they both hope, above all, for audiences to develop a curiosity towards Saikali’s art and the period of time in Beirut, which was instrumental in producing seminal works of Arab abstractions. The exhibition, Homs adds, aims to fill a marked gap, and hopefully springboard more discussion and exploration into the impact of women modern artists from the Arab world.

“There have been many exhibitions and books on the golden 1960s and 1970s, but nothing specifically on women,” he says. “That’s why it was challenging, in a way, to discover these new names. The exhibition is an addition to this larger narrative.”

Nadia Saikali and Her Contemporaries runs at Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah until July 13