Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps presents painted works by the Lebanese artist whose life and career traversed decades, continents, and media, defying both aesthetic and social conventions of her time and place. Bringing together a significant corpus of works that have rarely been seen together, the exhibition focuses on the body of work that Caland produced while living in Paris in the 1970s, the Bribes de corps [“Body Bits”] and constitutes the largest presentation of the series to date.

Caland’s own body and her preoccupations with its size and its pleasures motivated much of her work throughout this period, and this exhibition introduces the languages—sometimes joyful and sometimes pain-ridden—she cultivated in shape and color to speak of her experience alongside those of other bodies. The artist also played with what Western art history categorizes as the diametrically opposed poles of abstraction and figuration, rendering the distinction between color and line indiscernible, subject positions and parts indecipherable, and making normative or binaristic gendering unimaginable even as the body parts she painted often transform into landscapes or blend into the haze of color fields.

The work is contextualized in relationship to debates about gender and sexual norms in both France and Lebanon during the time. It concludes with a more recent painting from the artist’s late series of tapestry-like paintings, which bring her interest in the body and its surroundings to full force through a painterly idiom that borrows from the techniques and cultures of tatreez, or Palestinian embroidery. The exhibition also includes a selection of three embroidered dresses, which Caland designed and wore, and which consolidate the relationship between art and flesh in her practice.

The exhibition is made possible by the Smart Family Foundation through a grant to the Ambition Fund of The Arts Club of Chicago.

This exhibition is curated by Hannah Feldman, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.

During the run of the exhibition, The Arts Club will host two public programs in the gallery:

Thursday June 5

Evening Public Program: Visual Art

Janine Mileaf gives an Exhibition Tour of Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps

Program 6:00 pm

20th-century painter Huguette Caland (1931–2019), whose paintings made in Paris in the 1970s are now on view in the gallery at The Arts Club of Chicago, is also the current subject of a grand-scale retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Join Arts Club Executive Director and art historian Janine Mileaf for a guided tour of the exhibition at The Arts Club. 

Free and Open to All. Limited Capacity. Register here.

Thursday July 31

Evening Public Program

Body Bits: poetry, prose and performance in the gallery

Program 6:00 pm

In celebration of the landmark exhibition, Huguette Caland: Bribes de corps, The Arts Club of Chicago collaborates with MAKE Literary Productions to co-curate an evening of readings on the theme “Body Bits,” a loose translation of the exhibition’s title. Text-oriented artists in a variety of genres will perform alongside Caland’s evocative body of work with their own ruminations on bits, bumps, lumps, and the occasional humps here and there.

Free and open to all. Register here.

Image: Self Portrait (Bribes de corps), 1973, oil on linen. Courtesy Huguette Caland Estate