Hugette Caland forged a bold artistic career, during which she developed a signature approach to line and color, creating intricate, playful, and memory-infused paintings, drawings, sculptures, and clothing. The daughter of Lebanon’s first post-independence president, Caland moved to Paris at age 39 to pursue her goals as an artist, later settling in Venice, California, where she lived for nearly 30 years and was part of a dynamic group of artists that included leading members of West Coast abstraction. 

In Paris in the 1970s, Caland began painting her series “Bribes de corps,” or “body parts.” These abstracted paintings of bodies, both Caland’s own and those of her friends and lovers, feature colorful, sensual shapes colliding to form mysterious bodily landscapes. Of this series, Corps bleu exemplifies Caland’s playful, bold command of color which has positioned her as one of the most celebrated artists in both her native Lebanon and her adopted home of Los Angeles. 

Caland’s art is regularly featured in solo exhibitions and in group shows all over the world and has been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, La Bibliothèque Nationale, The British Museum, LACMA, Armand Hammer, Museum of Fine Art Houston, San Diego Museum of Art, Palm Springs Museum of Art, F. Weissman Art Foundation, as well as collections in the United States of America, South America, the Middle East, and Europe. She studied Fine Arts at the American University of Beirut.