Saloua Raouda Choucair

Born in Beirut in 1916, the Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair is a pioneer of abstract art in the Arab world.

Firmly believing in the arithmetical basis of Islamic art, she has long rejected figurative thinking and relinquished all symbolic or iconic references. Her art, never descriptive, shunned all that was personal in a quest for the ethereal.

She became famous for her sculptures that were composed of several individual pieces that could be either separated or assembled, just like the verses of an Arabic poem. Choucair, who cherished science, has also intuitively followed the Sufi experience in applying her artistic concepts. The final shape that she envisioned was an abstract form with infinite interactions, a blend of equations that existed between the elements of the piece and their surroundings.

For many years Saloua Raouda Choucair’s theories and creations went largely unappreciated and misunderstood except of some small circles of fans that originated in l’Atelier de l”Art Abstrait in Paris and then expanded to include art lovers of all generations and nationalities.

This book presents the reader with more then 250 colored plates of this phenomenal artist’s work, It also includes analytical texts that would shed some light on her philosophy and experience.