Samia Halaby (b.1936 in Jerusalem) is a Palestinian-American artist, activist, and scholar living and working in New York. She was educated in the 1950s in the American Midwest, at a time when abstract expressionism was popular, but female abstract painters were often rejected.
In the 1960s she started working with intense colors to construct geometrical shapes, that repeat and spread on canvas surfaces. Over time, the geometric forms transformed into lines and diagonals that defined the dynamics of her compositions, ultimately withdrawing to liberate highly colorful textured brushstrokes.
In her attempt to capture the process of growth and change observed in nature, and inevitably related to the flux of social realities, Halaby develops her distinctive artistic signature: her painting method is based on the visual perception of her environment, translated to canvas using abstract vocabulary, in a radical spirit of experimentation and creativity.
