|
|
Bio:
Saloua Raouda Choucair is an artist who was born in Beirut in 1916 and continues to live there. Trained in art as part of a program to involve female citizens in the project of modernizing, civilizing, and beautifying colonial and post-colonial Arab societies, Raouda Choucair developed a form of sculpture based on Sufic and scientific principles she felt were best suited to the modern world.
After studying casually with two of Lebanon's pioneer painters, Raouda Choucair worked in Paris between 1948 and 1951 in the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, La Grande Chaumière atelier, and Fernand Léger's atelier before participating in the establishment of L'Atelier de l'Art Abstrait led by Edgar Pillet and Jean Dewasne.
She returned to Beirut in 1951. For the next several decades Choucair's career was characterized by lone work in her atelier punctuated every decade or so with an extensive solo exhibition. Throughout the 1960s she garnered top prizes for her sculptures at the annual salons.
In 1969 she spent a year in France at the invitation of the French government, and starting in 1970 she was invited each year to send works to the Salon de Mai in Paris. In 1977 she began teaching sculpture at the Lebanese University, and in 1986 she lectured on sculpture at the American University of Beirut.
The last two decades of her life have been replete with local and national awards and a few public installations of her mammoth sculptures. In 2002 her career was documented in a catalogue raisonné produced by her daughter, Hala.
Links to other sites on Saloua Raouda Choucair's work: www.srchoucair.comMetropolitan Museum of ArtOne Fine Art
Click here for the the Virtual Gallery Exhibit
|
