Fascinated by colour, Lebanese-American artist Helen Khal was a painter of still life, figuration, and abstraction. Although an established artist in portraiture, Khal began to increasingly work in abstraction throughout the 1960s, becoming well known for her ethereal colour fields. This painting, composed of colour blocks that loosely resemble a hazy, light-infused landscape, evoking the horizon, is exemplary of her practice which is often seen as influenced by Rothko’s fields of colour paintings.

Born in Pennsylvania to Lebanese immigrants, Khal resettled in Lebanon in 1946 after visiting her grandfather in Tripoli. From 1946 to 1948, she studied art at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) under celebrated Lebanese painter, Cesar Gemayel. In 1947, Khal married famed Lebanese poet Yusuf Khal. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Khal emerged as a prominent figure in Lebanon’s art scene, contributing as an artist, active Anglophone art critic, educator, and co-founder, with her husband, of Gallery One (est.1963). She is the author of the book, The Woman Artist in Lebanon (1987).