Curated by Claire Gilman with Isabella Kapur
Huguette Caland made her first painting, the boiling monochrome Soleil rouge (Red Sun), in 1964, shortly after the death of her father, Bechara El Khoury, Lebanon’s first post-independence president. Six year later, she left her husband and children in Beirut and moved to Paris, where she began the series “Bribes de corps” (Body Parts), 1973, abstract works replete with tumescences and fleshy mounds suggestive of kissing mouths, entwined limbs, and flopping genitalia. Arriving less than a year after Caland’s death last fall, “Huguette Caland: Tête-à-Tête” marks the artist’s first solo museum show in the United States. The survey will cover fifty years of her paintings and drawings, as well as sculptures, mannequins, and haute couture caftans—designed for Pierre Cardin and emblazoned with insouciant line drawings of boobs, butts, and hirsute pudenda. Caland’s happy hedonism delights in the incorrigible intimacy and relationality of her forms—forever contiguous, cleavaging, dancing cheek-to-cheek.
