After the Iraqi coup of 1958 shattered the world Fahrelnissa Zeid knew, the Turkish artist found solace in the sea. Members of the Hashemite family she had married into were killed in Baghdad, and her husband, Prince Zeid bin Hussein, evacuated the London embassy where he was ambassador. Fearful of another assassination attempt, the couple retreated to the island of Ischia off the Italian coast, where Zeid’s painting took on a strange, unsettled energy.

Between long swims in the Bay of Naples, Zeid painted the iridescent blues of its grottos and visions of underwater worlds. In Aquatic Depths (Sea Cave), 1962 (overleaf), biomorphic shapes float unevenly, freed from the gravitational centre and rigid armature that anchor her signature abstractions. Among the few constants is the forceful slicing of paint with her palette knife.

Two of the three known paintings from Zeid’s time on Ischia were on view this spring in Immersion at the London gallery Dirimart, an intimate exhibition of watershed moments in the great Turkish modernist’s half-century career.

The curator, Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, Fahrelnissa’s former student and author of the biography Fahrelnissa Zeid: Painter of Inner Worlds, chose works from the artist’s estate to demonstrate her “most innovative” periods: the mid-1940s, 1950s and 1960s. “These mark when she moved from the figurative to the abstract, and then changed registers from abstract to abstract expressionism,” Laïdi-Hanieh said…