Fahr El-Nissa Zeid (Turkey, 1900-1991)
Lavender
oil on canvas
executed circa 1950s
72 x 58cm (28 3/8 x 22 13/16in).
Footnotes:
Lavender
A rare and exquisite painting by Fahrelnissa Zeid from her kaleidoscopic period

Provenance:
Property from the private collection, London
Property from the collection Fahr-El Nissa Zeid's personal assistant, Raymond Williams, England
Gifted directly from the artist to the above owner, circa 1970s

'This work is a rare specimen of Fahrelnissa Zeid's kaleidoscopic high period, a body of work that she widely exhibited in solo shows in private galleries in New York, London, Paris, and Zurich throughout the 1950s, as well as at the abstract art international exhibitions of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris'
- Adila Laidi-Hanieh


'Overabundance.'
by Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, PhD.

Fahrelnissa Zeid deployed colour, line, the sublime, and the infinitesimal in a five-decade-long career producing an extraordinary and timeless body of work. After exploring expressionist figuration during the War in Istanbul, she settled into abstraction from 1948 to 1968, and developed, then grew out of several styles in sequence.

The work on offer here belongs to her second abstract phase, of mainly monumental chromoluminarist compositions, into which she transitioned in the early 1950s after she gained in assurance with abstraction, creating her well-known kinetic vortexes.

This is a rare specimen to come for sale for a few reasons: Most works in that unique style have already been acquired in the span of three decades by important institutional and private collections, and because of its relatively medium size. Chromatically this painting is also unique given its dominance by pink, fuchsia and purple, while Zeid usually favoured primary colours.

Still, this work concentrates Fahrelnissa Zeid's high period style and gesture. The dynamic and kinetic swarming is reined in by an invisible base, and constituted by only four colours that jostle for space with white on the pictorial plane. Her energy allowed her to work rapidly and create complex abstractions that contemporary artists now execute via computer generated patterns projected onto canvases. Fahrelnissa Zeid created alone: First freely drawing a meandering pattern by charcoal on the canvas, then filling it with paint over hours or days of focused uninterrupted work.

Her sharp rapid thrusting line turns then returns, criss-crosses, and swarms the canvas, projecting her inner visions and inner states. In the interstices of the lines are ellipses of depth and light that create movement and flight. Yet Fahrelnissa Zeid is not only a linear painter, and this small work affords its viewers the treat of glimpsing her characteristic impasto and brush strokes.

This work is a rare specimen of Fahrelnissa Zeid's kaleidoscopic high period, a body of work that she widely exhibited in solo shows in private galleries in New York, London, Paris, and Zurich throughout the 1950s, as well as at the abstract art international exhibitions of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris. This success led her to be invited by the ICA in 1954, to showcase the latest artistic developments of the Nouvelle Ecole de Paris art movement to London audiences, making her the first woman artist to exhibit solo at that prestigious modernist hub.

What drove Fahrelnissa Zeid to work and paint prolifically? Art was for her a way out of her selfhood, like an 'overabundance' that 'starts where living does not suffice to express life'. She said that one does not paint to 'make art,' because 'there is no art, no works of art. There is the joy of living, the joy of creating, because one is not enough to oneself.'

in excellent overall condition, no evident losses or condition issues, canvas exhibiting the normal wear consistent with age, framed