Saloua Raouda Choucair, the Lebanese artist and pioneer of abstract art in the Middle East, has died. The news was confirmed by Sfeir-Semler Gallery in a social media post.
The artist worked in diverse media including painting, drawing, architecture, textiles and jewellery, but she was best known for her abstract sculptures which often took the form of small totems of interlocking elements in polished wood or stone. Her interest in abstraction was born out of a fascination with science, mathematics and Islamic art and poetry.
Born in 1916 in Beirut, Choucair was a student of Fernand Léger in the French artist’s Parisian studio during the 1940s (it was in France that she first encountered and fell in love with the architecture of Le Corbusier). Returning home in the late 50s she was awarded Lebanon’s National Council of Tourism Prize for the execution of a stone sculpture for a public site in Beirut in 1963. She was awarded the prize of the General Union of Arab Painters in 1985. Recent retrospectives of her work have been staged at the Beirut Exhibition Center in 2011 and Tate Modern in 2013.
27 January 2017
