Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy
English
Halabys current explorations in large-scale painting will be explored alongside her earliest forays into abstraction, with examples of her prolific drawing practice permeating throughout. Significantly, her kinetic paintings will demonstrate the development of abstract forms into moving compositions of colour and texture. Halabys current explorations in large-scale painting will be explored alongside her earliest forays into abstraction, with examples of her prolific drawing practice permeating throughout. Significantly, her kinetic paintings will demonstrate the development of abstract forms into moving compositions of colour and texture.
Samia Halaby (b. 1936) is widely recognized as a pioneer in twentieth-century abstraction and computer-generated art. She is a leading scholar on Palestinian art. In the last twenty years, Halaby has expanded her practice to larger, more ambitious paintings and canvas-based assemblages. She is an early practitioner of digital art, teaching herself programming languages and generating kinetic paintings of colourful shapes, sounds, and textures on a late 1980s Amiga computer. Throughout the 1990s, she developed a custom PC program that can generate moving shapes with live keyboard commands. With musicians Kevin Nathaniel Hylton and Hasan Bakr, she formed the Kinetic Painting Group and performed around the United States and in the Middle East. These kinetic paintings and performances, which Halaby has archived as digital video files, have been little studied and not yet exhibited. See more