Helen Khal

Helen Khal (1923 to 2009) was a Lebanese-American artist who worked in painting and drawing. She was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and died in Ajaltoun, Lebanon. Her subjects included flowers and the land. Writing from abroad, she felt her colour suffered without "that special light of Lebanon". Her mature works are small or medium colour-field abstractions. She built them from layers of diluted oil, on canvas and on paper mounted on wood or Masonite.

Khal began painting in her early twenties, during an illness. She studied at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, Beirut (1946 to 1948), and the Art Students League, New York (1949). Her work moved from portraiture and still life in the 1950s to abstraction in the 1960s. Water Jug (1964) uses acrylic and oil pastel on paper mounted on wood. Untitled (Ochre over Brown) (1968) is an oil on canvas, 100 by 100 cm. With the poet Yusuf al-Khal she co-founded Gallery One in Beirut. She taught at the American University of Beirut (1967 to 1976) and wrote criticism for The Daily Star and Monday Morning. She wrote the book The Woman Artist in Lebanon. During the civil war, from 1976, she lived in the United States.

Her first solo exhibition was at Galerie Alecco Saab, Beirut (1960). Later solo shows included Galerie Manoug (1968) and Contact Art Gallery (1972, 1974 and 1975), both in Beirut, and Bolivar Gallery, Kingston, Jamaica (1975). Group exhibitions include Forces of Change (1994), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington. In 2023 her work was in Action, Gesture, Paint at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. That year the Sharjah Art Foundation showed her in In the Heart of Another Country. Her work is in the collections of the Barjeel Art Foundation and the Sharjah Art Foundation.