Sharjah 24: The Sharjah Art Museum (SAM) presents Lasting Impressions: Samia Halaby, a Palestinian artist born in Jerusalem in 1936, currently living in New York. This is a major retrospective of her work and will include 180 works of various sizes and media representing her career through abstract paintings, sculptures, digital works, documentary drawings and more.
With a profound persuasion that future innovation in pictures lies in abstraction, she has remained dedicated to its boundless potential for over six decades. The abstraction she presents has its basis in reality by being an imitation of principles extracted from reality rather than one particular appearance of reality. Continuing her artistic endeavors until the present, she employs visual abstraction to convert what our senses have stored in our memory over a long period of time , “what the viewer and I already know”, into abstract visual form .Through such abstract creations she represent the inherent visual experience that resides within us all – abstract shape, color, light, and movement combine into an art in which the viewer recognises their own experiences. She does so by employing the extensive knowledge regarding methods and technologies that she avidly studied ranging from methods of using paint to using digital media.