Her Body, Her Art

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It was at a dinner party that Huguette Caland announced her plans to leave Beirut, as well as her husband and three children, for Paris. The Lebanese artist, who passed away in 2019 following an extensive battle with a neurological illness, only began her career as an abstract painter and designer when she was 39 years old. Spurred by the death of her father Bechara El-Khoury, the first president of independent Lebanon, Caland fled to France in order to find an identity outside of being a wife and mother. It was there that she started to explore the female form and challenge conventional standards of beauty and desire through her paintings.

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Over the course of her nearly 50-year career, Caland turned to art as a mechanism for change and confession. She grappled with issues spanning from the 1975-90 Lebanese Civil War (Guerre incivile, 1981) to the death of her then-partner George Apostu (Apostu, 1986). The artist’s most well-known series, however, deals with the body—specifically, her own. This May, Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art includes works from Caland’s “Bribes de corps” series in the first ever solo exhibition of the artist’s works in an American museum.

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“Huguette Caland: Outside the Line (1970-84)” features paintings from the artist during this influential time and follows recent retrospectives at LA’s Hammer Museum as well as the 2017 Venice Biennale. The result is a not-so-subtle exploration of the female form’s curves and orifices through a bright array of suggestive shapes and strategically constructed lines. Caland’s series toggles between abstract subtlety and overt eroticism. In Untitled (Bribes de corps), 1980, the intersecting shapes represent a slew of different anatomical structures, whereas in Bribes de corps, 1973, the female rear is presented with unabashed clarity. Suffice it to say, Caland—a prominent figure in the Abstract Expressionism movement as well as a groundbreaking feminist artist—has never been one to beat around the bush.

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‍“Huguette Caland: Outside the Line (1970-84)” is on view until October 6, 2024 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami at 61 NE 41st St, Miami, FL 33137.