Lot 25: * SALOUA RAOUDA CHOUCAIR (Lebanese, born 1916) Dual Height: 15 cm

Saloua Raouda Choucair (Lebanese, born 1916)
Dual
bronze sculpture in two interlocking parts
executed circa 1978
Height: 15 cm
FOOTNOTES
"A critic once told me that my work has a European influence. I object! It is a universal influence, what I experience everyone in the world experiences, and in fact, all of the rules I apply to my sculpture are derived from Islamic Geometric design"
Saloua Choucair

Notes:
For a version of the present piece in different colours, please see Jessica Morgan, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Tate Publishing, 2013, p.106

Choucair's long, varied and wide-ranging career has seen the Beirut-born artist experiment with a vast array of materials, forms and ideas. Blending ideas and approaches that draw on her twin guiding influences of Sufi Islam, and Modernist sculpture of the mid 20th century, Choicair's work emerges into being, complete with dynamic energy and poetic physicality.

Formed of negative spaces encapsulated and neatly balanced with brisk, idiosyncratic form, 'Dual' hints at her architectural approach to sculpture, whilst in choosing bronze, Choucair continued her ongoing investigations into diverse material possibilities. Around the time this work was made in the 1950s, Choucair was revelling in discovering the possibilities offered by numerous textures and substances – from wood to thread, steel to glass. Her seductive rhythmic curves and vertiginous forms wind playfully skywards, reaching into the sublime.

In a practice that covers over five decades of painting and drawing, architecture, textiles and jewellery, as well as sculpture, Choucair's polymath approach to realizing her art draws deeply on scientific, architectural, spiritual and mathematical disciplines. A groundbreaking icon of Arab art, she also blazed a trail for female artists during an era in which this was a notable exception, without losing sight of her foremost identity as an ever-questing and truly exceptional artist.