City II

Born 1931, Beirut · Died 2019, Beirut
Caland’s prolific career spanned over five decades. She often depicted the body as a landscape in her paintings, drawings, and textile works, offering feminist perspectives and a nuanced reading of the female form. The daughter of Bechara el-Khoury, first president of the independent Lebanon, Caland received personal artistic training from Italian painter Fernando Manetti in Beirut. In 1970 she moved to Paris, where she lived and worked for seventeen years. During that time, she explored an array of disciplines and began to create eroticized abstract paintings and drawings for which she is best known. In the curves and contours of her work, Caland audaciously evoked sensuality by intermingling minimalist yet corporeal-looking forms. Her unique vision was also materialized in a collection of caftans she designed in collaboration with French fashion designer Pierre Cardin in the 1970s. In 1997 Caland moved to Venice, California, where her home became a gathering place for local artists. She lived there until her return to Beirut in 2013. Her work is held in several institutional collections, including those of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; British Museum, London; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She exhibited extensively in the U.S., Beirut, and Paris. In 2018 a retrospective of her work was mounted at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art in New York.
As its title suggests, City II, created just before Calant’s departure for Paris, offers an abstract interpretation of the urban landscape that defined her everyday experience. The buildings, their façades and walls, dissolve into blocks of colour, gently punctuating the canvas with rhythmic harmony.