LONDON.- For Art Basel Qatar 2026, Stephen Friedman Gallery is delighted to exhibit a solo presentation by Lebanese artist Huguette Caland (1931-2019). The booth juxtaposes two significant early works from the 1970s alongside three paintings from her later series Faces and Places (2010s). The presentation demonstrates the artist’s enduring fascination with the human form throughout her 40-year-long practice.
Caland was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1931. Her father, Bechara El-Khoury, became the country’s first president after Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943. Always a bold and independent figure, Caland chose to marry Paul Caland, the nephew of one of her father’s political rivals. In 1964, after the passing of her father, Caland enrolled at the American University in Beirut to study fine art. In 1970, she made the decision to move to Paris, leaving her family and lover behind to pursue art full-time. She later made her home in Venice, California in 1987. The artist returned to Beirut in 2013, where she remained until her death in 2019.
Widely considered to have been under-appreciated during her lifetime, Caland has been the subject of several recent solo institutional exhibitions, including those held at The Drawing Center, New York (2021); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2020), curated by Mohammed Rashid Al Thani; and Tate St Ives, UK (2019). Her largest and most in-depth retrospective to date opened at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2025 and is currently on view at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg until the end of April 2026.
Following her move from Beirut to Paris in 1970, Caland’s own body and her preoccupations with its size and pleasures motivated much of her work. This is exemplified by Caland's Visage (1973); while predominantly abstract, the work’s soft contours and vivid hues conjure up eyes, lips, and curves. This painting is paired with another important early work, Me and Mustafa (1970), a witty and playful depiction of the artist and her lover merging as one. The solid expanses of colour that define these works, along with those from her concurrent Bribes de corps series, invite parallels with Colour Field painting, a forceful counterpoint to the male-dominated movement. The magnified, corporeal imagery recalls the work of Imogen Cunningham and Georgia O’Keeffe, placing them firmly within the modernist tradition.
These paintings are shown with a selection of works from Caland’s Faces and Places series, made four decades later when the artist had relocated to California. In this body of work, she developed a new style of mark-making, drawing inspiration from urban cartography, Lebanese textiles, and Palestinian embroidery. Discussing this series, Maite Borjabad López-Pastor (Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at The Art Institute of Chicago), writes: “I cannot help but think of Caland as part of the line of artists, architects and urbanists who literally inscribe their bodies into the map, into the city, into space […] With Caland, it is not only about inscribing bodies in the landscape but really making landscapes and urbanscapes through bodies and body parts.”
Anchoring the presentation is Faces and Places II (2010), a sweeping, three-metre-long painting which resembles a detailed tapestry. Thousands of lines and dots, built up across the surface of the canvas with meditative precision, create a pseudo-topography. Red lips, houses, and multiple pairs of eyes are dotted throughout, emerging from fields of magenta and yellow patchwork. The process of creating the work involved the artist folding and unfolding pieces of the unstretched fabric; working one section at a time, the final composition was only revealed in its entirety on completion. Accompanying this work are two striking paintings on undulating sheepskin. These exuberant works similarly highlight Caland’s later departure from explicitly engaging with the body, instead incorporating subtler references to the human form within detailed, geometric compositions.
Drawn to artistic practice as a means of personal freedom, Huguette Caland's oeuvre reveals her joyously defiant approach to art and life.
Other recent notable solo exhibitions include Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA (2025); Huguette Caland: Outside the Line, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida, USA (2024); Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête, Wiels, Brussels, Belgium (2022); Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête, The Drawing Center, New York, USA (2021); Huguette Caland: Faces and Places, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2020) and Huguette Caland, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, UK (2019).
Caland has participated in numerous group exhibitions including 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, Venice, Italy (2024); Présences arabes. Art moderne et décolonisation. Paris, 1908–1988, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France (2024); In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination Rises, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2023); Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2023); Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021); Women in Abstraction, Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain (2021); FIGURE/S: Drawing after Bellmer, The Drawing Room, London, UK (2021); Boundless Drop to a Boundless Ocean, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, USA (2021); Threadbare, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2021) and At the still point of the turning world, there is the dance, Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon (2019).
Her works are included in the permanent collections of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France; British Museum, London, UK;Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Fondation National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, USA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis, Tunisia; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA;Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA; Palm Springs Museum of Art, Palm Springs, USA; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, USA; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE and Tate, UK.
