Nadia Saikali grew up in a Beirut household where artistic expression was encouraged from a young age. She played the piano, practiced ballet and rhythmic dance, and started painting and drawing as a child. She was proud of Lebanon’s heritage, with the Mediterranean Sea embodying a sense of openness. She had a vivid imagination from an early age: her mother would often tell her to stop dreaming and come back to earth. It was thus a natural step for her to study at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Beirut (ALBA) from 1953 to 1956, after obtaining her baccalaureate at the Collège Protestant Français, initially taking both music and painting classes before dropping the former. She continued her studies in Paris from 1956 to 1957 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Atelier Cami) and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (Atelier Goetz), before returning to Beirut to paint and teach at ALBA from 1962 to 1974 and later also at the newly opened Institute of Fine Arts of the Lebanese University from 1965 to 1974.

Movement and her practice of drawing on the four elements – water, fire, earth and air – are perhaps the defining characteristics of N. Saikali’s work, as well as experimenting with different art forms. While her tapestry design for a 1963 Sursock Museum competition won her a prize, her main form of expression in the 1950s and 1960s was painting, using a brush and a palette knife. Towards the end of the decade, she started playing with media. She began to integrate elements into her canvases as collages – nails, small objects, threads (see Taureau [Bull], c. 1960s–1970s) and electric lights – and from there started producing three-dimensional works, which led to her kinetic creations, of which she was a pioneer in the Arab region. Her exhibition ‘Évolution – Recherche: œuvres Lumino-cinétiques’ at Beirut’s Orient Gallery in 1970 is considered the first exhibition of kinetic art in the Middle East. It was a novelty for Lebanon, recalls N. Saikali, while for her it was the result of artistic research and a natural step on her artistic journey. It was her imagination and sense of movement that led her to compose mixed media works such as Paysage Géodésique [Geodesic Landscape], (1972). “One dreams, one imagines, one realises”, she describes the inspiration for her artistic process. She often worked while listening to music. For the series that defined her work in the 1980s, Empreintes: Autoportraits – an example of which can be found in Empreinte Autoportrait, Ile Sanctuaire (1986) – her starting point was dancing on canvas.

In 1974 N. Saikali moved back to Paris, initially to continue her education at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (1974–1978) on a scholarship from the Lebanese state. After marrying her second husband, interior architect Henri Gaboriaud, she settled in France permanently. N. Saikali has been widely exhibited and recognised, especially in Lebanon and France. She had her first solo show at Beirut’s UNESCO Palace in 1956, and her first solo show in Paris at Galerie Marcel Bernheim in 1964. She took part in many group exhibitions and was a regular participant at the art salons in Lebanon – receiving the Sursock Museum Prize for Rampant Sun (1968) in the museum’s 8th Salon d’Automne – and France, as well as at Biennales in Alexandria, Paris and São Paulo. Her work is found in notable public and private collections in Lebanon, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, the USA, France and the UK, amongst others.