The B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music presents an exhibition dedicated to six pioneering female voices of geometric abstraction

The B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music inaugurates its autumn visual arts program with an exhibition dedicated to six pioneering female voices of geometric abstraction: Opy Zouni, Etel Adnan, Samia Halaby, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, and Lubna Chowdhary.

The exhibition will be inaugurated by the Minister of Tourism, Mrs. Olga Kefalogianni, on Wednesday, October 15, at 20:00.

Ebtisam Abdulaziz will be present at the opening and will also participate in a discussion held in conjunction with the exhibition on Thursday, October 16, at 17:00.

The works on view come from the collections of the Onassis Foundation, Irini Panagopoulou, the Barjeel Art Foundation, the Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation, and Ebtisam Abdulaziz, as well as from private collections.

The exhibition seeks to focus attention on the alternative narrative through which each of the six artists approaches, expands, and redefines the boundaries of abstraction, shifting the discourse from formalism to issues of memory, identity, politics, and cultural heritage. At the same time, it highlights and acknowledges the distinct genealogies of abstraction in the Arab world, where Islamic aesthetics with its emphasis on geometry, repetition, and calligraphy -functions not as decorative surface but as a system of thought and interpretation.

The notion of the morphological pattern is thus redefined, emphasizing its conceptual and philosophical depth. From Choucair’s modular structures and Halaby’s dynamic compositions to Chowdhary’s architectural forms, these traditions together propose an alternative narrative and version of abstraction. Etel Adnan, with her luminous landscapes that hover between form and abstraction, and Abdulaziz, with works that merge mathematics, language, and social critique, further expand this visual field.

Opy Zouni, born in Egypt, early on absorbed the visual idioms of Islamic art, embedding her work within a cross-cultural dialogue – a connection clearly evident in the works presented here. Her pieces form the core axis of the exhibition, engaging in a creative conversation with those of the other five artists.

In this way, the exhibition articulates an alternative narrative: abstraction is not an exclusively Western invention, but rather a universal language emerging with equal intensity from Beirut, Cairo, and Sharjah as from Paris and New York. It is a language that functions simultaneously as an act of resistance, a poetic expression, and a means of cultural continuity.

The exhibition, accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, is curated by art historian Yannis Bolis.