Fahrelnissa Zeid hailed from an elite Ottoman family and was one of the first artists of her generation to study at the Academy of Fine Arts for Women in Istanbul, which coincided with the decline of the Empire and the birth of the new Turkish Republic. Although Zeid painted several figurative works, she later abandoned this style in favour of abstraction. She outlined shapes of various sizes onto canvases, which she then meticulously painted in oils. In Untitled (1955), Zeid combined both geometric and abstract shapes that took the forms of squares, triangles, circles, crescents, and swirls to create a kaleidoscopic composition. Richly hued in a majestic colour palette, this work resembles an alternative example of early conceptual land art, which became more widely practiced in the 1960s and 1970s, and incorporated interventions, photography, and mapping. Zeid’s painting is reminiscent of an aerial landscape in which the outlines of buildings, fields, hills, mountains, and trees are defined by the black and white negative spaces that seek to highlight the complexity of the overall composition.
This is the first time the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Sara Raza
