Jun 24, 2018
Saloua Raouda Choucair’s 102nd Birthday
This Doodle’s Key Themes
Today we celebrate the Lebanese sculptor Saloua Choucair, a trailblazer of modern art.
Fascinated with science and mathematics, Choucair explored mathematical patterns through her abstract sculptures, known for their interlocking parts. Works like her Structure with One Thousand Pieces (1966-68) are renowned for their intricacy. A series she called “poems” was composed of numerous movable pieces that could be appreciated as separate pieces or as an assemblage, much like the verses of a Sufi poem.
After visiting the studio of the renowned French artist Fernand Léger, she was inspired to push even farther into abstraction. A small 1947 show of her work at Beirut’s Arab Cultural Gallery is widely recognized as the earliest exhibition of abstract art in the Arab world. “It’s a universal influence,” Choucair once said of her work, which ranged from sculpture and installation to design and architecture. “What I experience, everyone in the world experiences.”
Like many great artists, Choucair gained recognition and acclaim later in life, creating until she was 90 years old. A tireless worker, she filled up her sketchbooks with endless designs before prototyping ideas in stone, wood, metal, plastic or fiberglass. She was 97 years old when London’s Tate Modern put on a retrospective spanning her 70-year career, her first outside of Lebanon.
Happy birthday, Saloua Choucair!
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