Fahrelnissa Zeid at Frieze Masters

Dirimart is pleased to announce its participation at Frieze Masters in the Spotlight section curated by Camille Morineau (co-founder and Research Director of AWARE—Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions) and dedicated to women artists; with an exceptional selection of works by Fahrelnissa Zeid.       

Referred to as “one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century” by Tate Modern at the occasion of her retrospective exhibition in 2017, Zeid’s (1901–91) career spans many stylistic changes and explorations of different media. She became celebrated in her lifetime for her monumental and dynamic abstract compositions that engulf the viewer in fields of colour, light and energetic movement, as well as for her later expressionistic portraits of family and close friends. These works reflect her conception of art as a ceaseless forward quest, driven by a spiritual need to produce painterly renditions of cosmic journeys and inner psychic universes.

Zeid is most affiliated with her presence in postwar Paris but she also exhibited her work in London in the late 1940s and 1950s, as well as in New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Her artistic reputation from Paris brought her back into the London art scene, making her the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in 1954.