Female sexuality and the power of the female body are at the moment under the spotlight: they have indeed recently appeared in topics of debate going from the terrorist attack at the end of Ariana Grande's Manchester show on Monday night where the victims and the injured were mainly young girls and women, to the recent TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood's scary dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale in which fertile women are seen as bodies with one main function – procreation.
Art can inspire further visions and interpretations of the female body, as proved by Huguette Caland. She learnt to draw from an Italian artist living in Lebanon, Fernando Manetti and in the '60s she attended the American University of Beirut, exhibiting in 1970 at the Dar el Fan Art Centre.
Caland's first artworks featured crowded and circus scenes, but, as the years passed, she focused more on minimalist pieces that revolved around female sexuality, a theme she explored via empty spaces and delicately small details.
In 1971 she made for example a self-portrait in the form of a pubis that went on to inspire a series of erotic drawings. The artist started therefore using simple hand drawn lines to suggest the female body or to translate on paper encounters of bodies, or the silhouettes of breasts and genitals.
Since 1988 the artist has lived in Venice, California, and nowadays she is considered as a leading exponent of feminist art on the Lebanese scene, together with other artists such as Yvette Achkar, Etel Adnan and Helen Khal.
Caland's art is a combination of Lebanese and Western influences at times filtered through Pop Art: she has currently got a few erotic drawings and paintings at the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
Her pieces are on display in the Arsenale section dedicated to the "Dionysian Pavilion", a space celebrating the female body, its sexuality, life and pleasure. Caland has also included her caftans in this space: "Miroir", "Tête-à-Tête" and "Tendresse" are indeed on display on her wood dummies.
These surrealist garments on which simple thread is used to recreate symbolical embroideries and trace the countour of a woman's body, two faces kissing or hands hugging the wearer's body (while one hand seems to be shutting the dummy's mouth...) could be conceived as ways to explore the dichotomy between Lebanese conservatism and the Western world so focused and obsessed by appearances.
While these pieces should be deemed as art rather than fashion, there could be space for Caland's artworks and delicate erotic works in the fashion realm as well.
Image credits for this post
Image 5 on this post, Huguette Caland's at the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, Viva Arte Viva, by Italo Rondinella, Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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