Samia Halaby: ‘Studio’ at Frieze Masters 2025

Samia Halaby

History has made abstract painting the path through which the language of pictures will grow. The task of pictures is to hold the content of their time that cannot be described in other forms; the challenge I have accepted is that of developing the formal language of pictures in ways that will allow them to hold new, contemporary content. 

In 1986, I decided to learn how to code. When I ran the simplest graphic commands and watched the visual material unfold, I caught a glimpse of something compelling and unusual. My first discovery was that computing allowed abstraction to possess motion, just as film allowed photography to become moving pictures. Herein lies the essence of my digital paintings: they are abstractions in motion.

Coded abstract paintings have shapes that grow, expand, contract, change colour, disappear, reappear and incorporate sound. They have a picture plane that possesses memory and emits light. A new visual language developed for a new technology, one that could manage the changing of things. I had to apply aesthetic consideration to its relative speed and to the rhythm of events unfolding in time.  

The introduction of time as a dimension of space affected all aspects of this visual language. The constructivists and cubists wrote consistently about time as a new dimension in abstract painting. Abstraction in motion, coded kinetic painting, became for me a deeply satisfying realization of the writings of the revolutionary artists of the first decades of the 20th century.  

Coding kinetic paintings rested on a few decades of painting in oil. Learning from the offspring, the colour in my paintings became brighter and my creative wilfulness more open to intuition. 

Samia Halaby is presented by Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Studio at Frieze Masters 2025 (Stand F11).

About Studio

Now in its third year, Studio, curated by Sheena Wagstaff, highlights the commitment of Frieze Masters to living practice in dialogue with historical art. By focusing on artists’ place of making, it reflects the idea of the past informing the present moment of creation in an object for the future. This year, the six featured artists are: Glenn Brown, Dorothy Cross, Anju Dodiya, Samia Halaby, R. H. Quaytman and Anne Rothenstein.

Explore Studio

Further Information

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^{Main image: Samia Halaby, Lines 3, 1986 (still from a kinetic painting coded on an Amiga computer). Courtesy: the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg}