Abu Dhabi Art Fair 2025

27/01/2026

DG Art Gallery & Project took part in Abu Dhabi Art 2025 — one of the most prestigious global meeting points for modern and contemporary art — presenting a selection of works by Fahrelnissa Zeid, one of the pioneering figures of Turkish art history, to international art professionals and collectors.

The curatorial selection presented at the DG stand focused on the artist’s distinctive visual language shaped between Eastern and Western aesthetics, as well as the expressive power of her abstraction, while reasserting Zeid’s timeless and singular position within 20th-century modernism.

Fahrelnissa Zeid

Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901–1991) was one of the groundbreaking figures of 20th-century modernism, and her work merged Eastern and Western sensibilities through a highly personal visual language. Born as Fahrünnisa Şakir on Büyükada, Istanbul, into a prominent Ottoman family, Zeid studied at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts and later at the Académie Ranson in Paris, where she encountered European abstraction. Her practice evolved into a synthesis of cultural and artistic traditions, bringing together Islamic geometry, Byzantine mosaics, Persian ornamentation, and the chromatic harmonies of Western modernism.

Zeid became renowned for her monumental, kaleidoscopic compositions—large canvases filled with intricate networks of lines and planes of luminous color that seem to extend beyond their frames. Working primarily in oil paint, she layered transparent and opaque pigments to achieve a sense of light and movement reminiscent of stained glass or cosmic cartographies. Her technique combined disciplined draftsmanship with gestural freedom, producing dynamic surfaces that balance control and spontaneity.

During the 1950s and 1960s, while living between London and Paris, Zeid gained international recognition for these radiant abstractions, which reflected both her fascination with spiritual order and her response to the fragmented modern world. In her final decades in Amman, she turned toward portraiture, transforming human figures into luminous, meditative icons that combined figuration and abstraction. Zeid’s art embodies a rare dialogue between the structural complexity of Islamic art and modernism’s search for universality. Her visionary technique and transcendent use of color positioned her as one of the most significant artists of both Turkish and Arab modernism, as well as a singular voice within global postwar abstraction.