Samia Halaby

Samia Halaby has generously produced five artworks, each in a limited edition of 10, especially for Tate to coincide with the exhibition Electric Dreams at Tate Modern, 28 November 2024 – 1 June 2025.

Purple Rain, 2024, along with the other works in the series, is a still from a moving abstract animation which Halaby calls a ‘kinetic painting’. Halaby began creating her kinetic painting works after teaching herself how to code on a Commodore Amiga 1000, one of the first widely available personal computers released in 1985. Halaby’s experimentations with computer-generated visuals evolved into developing her own computer programme in the 1990s with musicians Kevin Nathaniel Hylton and Hasan Bakr. The Kinetic Painting Program generates abstract shapes that Halaby manipulates in real-time using the keyboard of her PC, transforming it into a digital painting instrument. For Halaby, early developments in computer technology allowed her to push the boundaries of painting and explore new forms of visual language. She says ‘It is what the computer could provide that the painting on canvas could not that is significant.’

Each artwork is sold individually and is signed and numbered by the artist on the front. Prices of the artwork are liable to change. As a limited edition sells out, prices of the artwork are subject to increase and the price will be clearly indicated.

• Artist Samia Halaby
• Artwork Purple Rain, 2024
• Exhibition Electric Dreams
• Dimensions 30.5 x 38.1 cm
• Material Digital pigment print on paper
• Edition Edition of 10, signed and numbered on the front

Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem) is a Palestinian-American artist and scholar celebrated for her trailblazing work in contemporary abstract art. She is recognised as one of the early innovators of digital art in the 1980s and is known for creating dynamic geometric paintings that explore the relationship between art and technology. As a scholar, she has contributed significantly to the documentation of Palestinian art of the twentieth century.

Her work has been exhibited since the 1960s. Selected solo exhibitions include Eye Witness, MSU Broad Art Museum, Michigan, USA, 2024; Fragments of time - paintings & digital works, Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg, Germany, 2024; Documentary Drawings of the Kafr Qasem Massacre, Birzeit University Museum, Ramallah, Palestine, 2017; Five Decades of Painting and Innovation, Beirut Exhibition Center, Beirut, Lebanon, 2015. Selected group exhibitions include Foreigners Everywhere, 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, 2024; Palestine: La création dans tous ses états (Palestine: Creativity in all its Generations), Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France, 2009; Palestinian Art, The Royal Academy of Art, Stockholm, Sweden, 1998; and Art of Two Cities - Kansas City and Minneapolis (Purchase Award), traveling exhibition: Time-Life Gallery, New York, USA, 1965.