Helen Khal (1923-2009) was a Lebanese-American painter, art critic and gallerist. She was born in Pennsylvania in a family from Tripoli, North Lebanon, where she started painting. In 1946, she married young poet Yusuf Al Khal in Lebanon, where she settled. That same year, she enrolled at Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (Alba). In 1960 she had her first solo exhibition at Galerie Alecco Saab in Beirut. Three years later, she and her husband founded Gallery One. She is the author of numerous articles and publications, including The Woman Artist in Lebanon in 1987.

In 2019, Helen Khal was the central figure of the exhibition At the still point of the turning world, there is the dance, curated by Carla Chammas and Rachel Dedman at Sursock Museum, Beirut, in the context of Home Works 8: A Forum on Cultural Practices.

The abstract path of Helen Khal, which is often seen as reminiscent of Rothko’s paintings, was accomplished with the high encouragement of Aref Rayess. As Wafa Roz writes, “Her colourful paintings, small or medium in scale, show simple geometrical forms such as circles, rectangles, squares, or merely bars and stripes. Khal’s forms bear no symbolic connotation; they serve as containers of colour and navigate via colour. They are a result of multiple layers of diluted oil paint softly applied on the canvas in different directions.”