HUGUETTE CALAND

Lebanese artist Huguette Caland (b.1931) has her first UK museum solo exhibition at Tate St Ives. Taken from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, many of the works will be shown in the UK for the first time, revealing her artistic significance. Caland's exploratory practice has had a key, if under-recognised, role in the development of international modern art. In the 1970s, after moving to Paris from Beirut, she created exuberant and erotically-charged paintings, which challenged traditional conventions of beauty and desire. The female physique is a recurrent motif in her work, depicted as landscapes or amorphous forms. Caland has often used her own body as a subject, and her self-representation comes from a desire to liberate and control how her own body and the bodies of other women are depicted. The exhibition will include large canvases with bright colours, such as her Bribes de corps (Body Parts) series from the 1970s, softly moving from abstraction into figuration, with shapes doubling as flesh. Alongside these paintings are Caland's intricate drawings, which demonstrate her mastery of line. In these works, portraits of friends and lovers transform into landscapes, and landscapes into overtly sexualized body parts.