Hussein Madi (Lebanese, b. 1938)

The present work is a very delicate pink early composition by Madi filled with supple forms and a return to the fundamental sources of his oeuvre, much like a Sumerian cuneiform tablet filled with Shapes and lines. Here we can see the artist creating a new vocabulary composed of small organic entities floating on the surface in a very rhythmic musicality.

This work comes from a period that corresponds to a production of Madi’s discovery of his own alphabet, his own artistic codes. He is an artist who studied art and art history and explored the development of writing that started in his own fertile Levant. It is here that he explored the meanings of symbols that stood for words and their voices. The artist found solace in this primitive happiness of expressing his ideas. Discovering the dynamics of line throughout his fifty-year career, Madi in the present work assembles in what appears to be the purest lines forming the foundations of the subjects he uses within his entire oeuvre, including that of still lifes, female portraits, interior scenes and his iconic bird aesthetics.