Saloua Raouda Choucair: Selected Works

Overview

A modernist who apprenticed with Moustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi, studied with Fernand Léger, copiously analysed Le Corbusier’s ‘Cité radieuse’ and worked at l’atelier d’art abstrait in the 1940s, Saloua Raouda Choucair developed a unique abstract practice that included sculpture, painting, industrial design and public art. Her interlocking forms in painting and sculpture incorporate her interests in Arabic architecture and language, alchemy and quantum physics to suggest multiple interpellations of scale and perspective. Like her contemporaries Lygia Clark and Isamu Noguchi, Choucair took great influence from the natural world, both its rational organisation and imperfect equilibrium, crafting works that resound with movement and sensuality.

SB12 presents examples of Choucair’s ‘Duals’, ‘Modules’ and ‘Interforms’, works that recall the autonomous stanzas of Islamic poetry, Sufi longing for divine unity and the biological structure of matter. Also presented here are early paintings that reveal her sublime studies of colour and form, predicated on a visual ratio achieved through mathematical division and the repetition of shapes along rotating axes.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 12