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Huguette Caland

A Life in a Few Lines
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Sensual and Courageous

Throughout a career that spanned almost five decades, the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland (1931–2019) defied the societal and aesthetic expectations of her time. Her multifaceted oeuvre is informed by her life between different cultures and places. Having grown up in Beirut as the daughter of Lebanon’s first president, Caland left her family to spend the 1970s and 1980s in Paris before moving to the Venice neighborhood in Los Angeles in 1987; she did not return to Beirut until 2013. In paintings, drawings, sculptures, and fabric works, she challenges traditional representations of sexuality, bodies, and desire. Straddling the division between figuration—sometimes with explicitly erotic motifs—and abstraction, the artist developed her characteristic alphabet of curves, slits, bulges, and dimples, with which she was well ahead of her time.

This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines, organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in collaboration with Deichtorhallen Hamburg. The volume surveys Caland’s oeuvre, gathering over three hundred works. The extensive essay section paints a detailed picture of the historical context in which her art flourished and retraces biographical lines. It includes contributions by the curator of the exhibition Hannah Feldman, as well as by Alessandra Amin, Alex Aubry, Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Brigitte Caland, Rachel Haidu, Aram Moshayedi, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, along with writings by the artist.