After a particularly heavy storm in 1991, the artist Nabil Nahas took a walk along Southampton Beach in Long Island, New York, and found it littered with starfish, spewed out by the recently tumultuous sea. According to William Lawrie, who wrote an essay on the seminal Lebanese artist many years later, it was the turning point in his career. “Fascinated by the random composition they made against the wet sand, Nahas attached a starfish body to one of the panels of a diptych, itself part of the Circle series,” writes Lawrie. “This was a pivotal work and he knew it, thus entitling it Eureka.”

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