Trained in both Paris and Istanbul, Fahrelnissa Zeid was an important figure of the Turkish avant-garde in the early 1940s and of the École de Paris in the 1950s. Her vibrant abstract paintings, many of them monumental, are a synthesis of Islamic, Byzantine, Arabic and Persian influences fused with European abstraction. In the final years of her life she unexpectedly returned to figurative painting, creating stylised portraits of friends and family.
