Editor’s Pick
“‘Throughout art history, the greatest advancements were during times of revolution. I was saying, 'Why am I painting in oil? What is the technology of my time?'" —Samia Halaby
The Palestinian artist taught herself BASIC and C on a Commodore Amiga in the late ’80s, turning code into kinetic paintings where shapes tangle and sprout, fold and breathe. Four early digital works now run on a monumental screen in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Haas Atrium. Color catches in obsolescent code, with crumbling electricity and dancing chroma. Growth captured in code, nature’s logic translated into light.”
-Andrew Berardini
About the Exhibition
A prolific painter and pioneer in digital art, Samia Halaby has been exploring the visual language of abstraction for over six decades. The artist’s dynamic painting compositions investigate how we perceive the moving world through the interplay of textures, surfaces, color, and light. This direction emerged out of her love and study of early 20th century abstraction as in Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism wherein time emerged as a new dimension in pictures. Halaby’s explorations in computer programming led to abstractions in motion. After purchasing a Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1986, she taught herself how to code in computing language BASIC and C for creating what she calls “kinetic paintings”. Combinations of numbers became her color palette, and marks on a canvas turned into illuminated pixels on a screen. Lines and shapes are no longer static planes in this expanded form of picture making. They can sprout with growth and change captured over time on a computer surface with endless depth, akin to the living and generative characteristics of nature.
This presentation brings four kinetic paintings from SFMOMA’s collection to a monumental digital screen in the museum’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium. Each work was independently coded by Halaby and previously could only run on their native machine. In recent years, the artist was able to preserve and record these digital works through a computer emulator, allowing audiences to experience them in new display formats and through renewed technologies.