Sometimes coincidences make art go to time to their appointment with history. The exhibition HUGUETTE CALAND. A LIFE IN A FEW LINESinaugurated on Tuesday morning at the Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid, which aims They have not even been able to reach the Madrid center from Lebanon because of the war situation in which the area is immersed.
“The work is partly incomplete,” explained the police station, Hannah Feldman, a professor of contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania, graduated in Harvard and Dr. specialized in decolonization in art. “About thirty pieces have not been able to arrive because at the time of obtaining transfer permits from Lebanon, the fire was not in force,” he explained. The works have been replaced by others, but for Feldman, American, the situation is worrying at a time “when the president of my country wants to do an ethnic cleaning in Gaza and Lebanon’s airspace is taken by Israel,” he denounced .
The exhibition is immense. Open to the public from Wednesday, February 19 to August 25, it is the first great retrospective dedicated to the Lebanese in Europe. It consists of more than 300 works by Caland (1931-2019) distributed in 12 rooms, in all formats, although the main thing is painting. “A painting full of meat and that is a deep dialogue with the traditions of the Middle East”, in the words of Manuel Segade, director of Reina Sofía, who pointed out that such an exhibition is “necessary to make memory of contemporary art in the region in the region , and widen the historical understanding of the position of women in the Middle East since the sixties. ” Although the exposure was not designed (it began to gestate years ago by the previous director, Manuel Borja-Villel) in this concrete geopolitical context, his relevance cannot be denied, especially taking into account the political vocation that Caland always had: ” She said that her medium was not painting or sculpture, but life itself; Art and life, mixed, as art and politics, in all his work, ”said Feldman Commissioner.
“Huguette Caland always said that art and politics are inseparable,” said Dirk Luckow, director of the DeichTorhallen of Hamburg, the institution with which Queen Sofia has created this exhibition and where the works will leave in October. “From the female body and its importance in art and politics, yours is a multifaceted work that mixes the political with the grotesque, solemn with the vital, and who speaks of someone who always sought with all its might to break with the conventions ”.
The only child who was later the first president of the Lebanese Republic, Bechara El Khoury, Caland’s life was fascinating and passed between Beirut, Los Angeles and Paris. “He is known for works on which he focuses on his own body, and has emphasized the eroticism of some of his paintings, but his work went further: he claimed feminine freedom in all its forms, also as a creator,” Feldman held. “For Caland, the figure of the woman was a great concern. Especially the Palestinian women, ”in fact, in 1969 he was co -founder of INAASH,“ an NGO that, until today, continues to help Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon, ”explained the commissioner, who has dedicated four years of investigation between California, the Emirate of Sharjah, Beirut and Los Angeles to carry out the exhibition.
The exhibition, chronological, covers from the sixties to 2000, five decades represented in more than 300 works distributed by an immense space that covers a dozen rooms of the Madrid museum. From its first picture, the almost monochrome and reddish Red sun / Cancerwhich he created after his father’s death because of this disease, until his most experimental aspect in the nineties, going through those who may be his most famous creations, the Bodies (Bodies of bodies), larger paintings, bright colors and abstract shapes, generally rounded, that transmit a sensation of carnality and caress.
The truth is that in such a wide retrospective there is space for everything: works influenced by the Lebanese civil war (from 1975 to 1990 and in which 150,000 people died), which inspired cadres of pastel tones in which faces are crowded, torsos mutilated, hanging appendices. Works that turn to pastel tones in the eighties, pure ink abstractions on Japanese paper, collages With newspapers or photographs, dresses nourtapestries, work written in notebooks, a filmpaper sketches … All this shows of the personality unobornably eclectic and in perpetual aesthetic redefinition for more than five decades, in which, in addition, the forms of sexuality are becoming more explicit over the years, when its grew incessant rate of production.
“Until now, the West has been unable to see the complexity of his work,” Feldman closed this morning. “His art was based on reaching our identity through others, social conventions, vulnerable minorities for gender or nationality, money, love, and, in the end, aging and mortality,” he explained. A LIFE IN A FEW LINESby the way, it is a phrase of her work, but in reality she was dedicated to her husband, Paul; The Huguette Caland is impossible for him to fit in so little space.
