HAMBURG.- Huguette Caland (1931–2019) captivates through the extraordinary resolve with which she made her own life the starting point of her art. »The media I used for art is mostly my own life. (…) Every single exchange, a look, a smile, a brief encounter.« Across painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, textiles, and writing, the Lebanese artist explores how the self takes shape in relation to others. In her art, these relationships emerge at once playful and fraught, unabashedly erotic yet deeply profound.

Developed in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the retrospective A Life in a Few Lines offers the first comprehensive presentation of Caland’s work in Europe. Structured in ten chapters, the exhibition narrates a journey across cultures and continents that led Caland from Beirut to Paris, on to Venice, California, and finally back to Beirut. While her work received only limited recognition during her lifetime, it is today represented in the world’s most renowned museums.

Huguette Caland was born in Beirut in 1931 as the only daughter of Bechara El Khoury, the first president of the Republic of Lebanon following the country’s independence from France in 1943. From the outset, her life was shaped by politics. Later, from Paris, she followed the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) with great intensity. She had moved there in 1970 in order, as she put it, to »spread her wings« as an artist. From 1987 onward she lived in Venice. All three cities left a deep mark on her artistic practice, which was suffused with feminist autonomy and sexual freedom—even if she would not have called it that. As both an artist and a woman, she refused to be categorized. She challenged artistic conventions with the same subversive playfulness with which she defied the social norms of her time.

THE EXHIBITION: OF BODIES AND LANDSCAPES

A Life in a Few Lines unfolds chronologically, tracing Huguette Caland’s life and artistic development. Themes such as the body, memory, belonging, landscape, and death run throughout her oeuvre, which is deeply personal yet often marked by a disarming wit. Caland only decided to become an artist relatively late, at the age of 33. By then, her children were already teenagers, and her parents had passed away.

The first chapter of the exhibition, Becoming, reflects this moment with her first painting Red Sun/Cancer (1964), an almost monochromatic, abstract painting, and her Self Portrait in Smock (1992), which features the artist almost thirty years later standing in front of this earlier painting.

The subsequent chapters present series such as Flirt (1972) or Homage to Pubic Hair (1992) in which Caland explores sexuality, eroticism, and corporeality with surprising openness and humor. Among her best-known works is the series Bribes de Corps from the 1970s, with its images of eyes, mouths, buttocks, thighs, and other touching »body parts« rendered at once abstract and intensely sensual. At the same time, Caland designed a haute couture collection of caftans and abayas for the Parisian couturier Pierre Cardin. Earlier, in Beirut, when she began her art studies, she had started designing free-flowing garments for herself that combined Arab fashion traditions with her own playfully graphic textile designs.

Huguette Caland was fluent in Arabic, French, and English, and engaged deeply with language in relation to identity and communication. In her art, this interest took many forms. In early works such as Cobra (1967) and Exit (1970), she developed a personal vocabulary of curves, dots, shapes, and distinctive lines that echoes Arabic calligraphy. Later came series such as the Nude Letters (1991–1992), in which she collaged fragments of correspondence, or the Silent Letters, begun in 1999: instead of words, she filled the surface with lines, sometimes painted with a large brush onto a paper or canvas surface laid flat on the floor.

Landscapes, specific places, and urban spaces formed another central motif, Kaslik (1968) and Venice 1 and Venice 2 (1985) to the Cityscapes (1998–2005). The latter marked a transition toward the large-scale, tapestry-like works of her final period. She always created these late, large paintings piece by piece on her lap, so that they only gradually came together as a whole. Toward the end of her life, Caland appears to have envisioned the world from a universal horizon—embracing a multitude of different yet interweaving perspectives.

WHAT SETS THIS EXHIBITION APART: A DIFFERENT HORIZON

Curated by art historican Hannah Feldman, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, the exhibition demonstrates how Huguette Caland set in motion categories that Western art history has sought to keep apart: the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, aesthetics and kitsch, and even figure and ground. Seen within the broader context of her oeuvre, with its many intercultural references, it becomes clear that her renowned works—ranging from the subtly to the explicitly erotic—are far more than expressions of the sexual liberation of the 1960s. They bring together bodies, words, and forms in poetic ways; dissolving boundaries to tell stories of intimacy and freedom, of kinship and community, and of the intricate entanglement of art and life.

With around 300 works from international private collections and renowned institutions—including pieces from Lebanon added specifically for the presentation at the Deichtorhallen—this retrospective is the first comprehensive exhibition of Caland’s work in Germany. The exhibition was organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in collaboration with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. It will subsequently be shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

»The exhibition demonstrates how Huguette Caland grew in dialogue with the world and cultures around her. (…) As unique and exceptional as she was herself and as her body of work is, there are no singulars in her work, only multitudes and fluidities. In this lies not only her greatest aesthetic achievement, but also the most prescient political lesson her work offers us today« --- Hannah Feldman, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Pennsylvania and curator of the exhibition

THE WHOLE CURATORIAL STATEMENT BY HANNAH FELDMAN

A Life in a Few Lines not only introduces viewers to Caland’s extraordinary oeuvre and phenomenal talent but also aims to create links between bodies of work that might, at first glance, seem disparate and unconnected. A principal link throughout the exhibition is language, both as a form of expression and as a plastic, material vocabulary of form through which to experiment aesthetically. As Caland’s life developed and entered into her work in both emotional and material ways, the exhibition demonstrates how she grew in dialogue with the world and cultures around her, always attentive to the ways in which freedom and autonomy do not mean separation from the other, but rather, a careful incorporation of the many into the one. As unique and exceptional as she was herself and as her body of work is, there are no singulars in her work, only multitudes and fluidities. In this lies not only her greatest aesthetic achievement, but also the most prescient political lesson her work offers us today.

Huguette Caland (1931–2019) grew up within the cosmopolitan milieu of the Lebanese elite. Her father, Bechara El Khoury, was the first president of the independent Republic of Lebanon. In 1964 she began studying fine arts at the American University of Beirut. In 1970 she moved to Paris to devote herself fully to her artistic development; in 1987 she relocated to Venice, California, before returning to Beirut in 2013. In 1969 she co-founded the non-governmental organization INAASH, which continues to support Palestinian women in Lebanese refugee camps by helping them sustain and market the traditions of Palestinian embroidery, known as tatreez. Today, her works are represented in major museum collections, including SAMoCA, the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate.