Over the last six decades, artist, scholar and art historian Samia Halaby has developed a visual language drawing on western abstraction, the Bauhaus movement, medieval Islamic architecture and digital art. Geometric shapes are central to her work, and she is particularly interested in the different ways that colour is perceived depending on the light. Yellow Square (1963) was produced during Halaby’s formative years, just after she finished her university studies in the United States. She and her family had been displaced from their home in Palestine during the Nakba in 1948 and moved to Lebanon and then the United States. The structures Halaby created in this period feel negotiated and dynamic rather than rigid. In Yellow Square, several rectangular forms in muted tones seem suspended mid-motion. It remains ambiguous whether they are about to engulf the vivid yellow square anchoring the centre of the painting, or if the yellow square itself is expanding outward, absorbing the rest of the composition.

^{*Currently exhibited at Aranya Art Center}