Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s @ Grey Art Gallery, New York University -"Taking Shape" Exhibition + Other Venues

Taking Shape 

Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s

Grey Art Gallery at New York University

January 14 – April 4, 2020

Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s explores the development of abstraction in the Arab world via paintings, sculpture, and works on paper dating from the 1950s through the 1980s. By looking critically at the history and historiography of mid-20th century abstraction, the exhibition considers art from North Africa and West Asia as integral to the discourse on global modernism. At its heart, the project raises a fundamental art historical question: How do we study abstraction across different contexts and what models of analysis do we use?

Examining how and why artists investigated the expressive capacities of line, color, and texture, Taking Shape highlights a number of abstract movements that developed in North Africa and West Asia, as well as the Arab diaspora. Across these regions, individual artists and artist collectives grappled with issues of authenticity, national and regional identity, and the decolonization of culture. 

Drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the exhibition features nearly 90 works by a diverse group of artists such as Etel Adnan, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Kamal Boullata, Huguette Caland, Ahmed Cherkaoui, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Rachid Koraïchi, Mohamed Melehi, and Hassan Sharif, among others. On view are works produced by artists from countries including Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and United Arab Emirates. The exhibition was curated and organized by Suheyla Takesh, Curator at the Barjeel Art Foundation, and Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.

Taking Shape investigates the principles and meaning of abstraction in the context of the Arab world during the 1950s through the 1980s, a period that was significantly shaped by decolonization; the rise and fall of Arab nationalism(s); socialism; rapid industrialization; multiple wars and subsequent mass migration; the oil boom; and new state formations in the Arab/Persian Gulf. By the mid-20th century—and in parallel to growing opposition to Western political and military involvement in the region—many artists in the Arab world began to adopt a much more critical viewpoint toward culture, striving to make art relevant to their own political, cultural, and historical contexts. New opportunities for international travel during these years, and the rise of the circulating exhibition, also gave way to new forms of cultural and educational exchanges that allowed artists to encounter multiple modernisms—including various modes of abstract art—and to consider the role of the artist in the contemporary international landscape. “Via a critical examination of abstraction in the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, the exhibition invites a (re)consideration of the attribution of abstraction’s emergence to a single historical moment.” Takesh explains. “In its own way of emulating the artistic practices of the time, the exhibition is also a vantage point on how contemporary discourse on global modernisms and decentralized genealogies of abstraction is unfolding or, in a nod to the title of the show, taking shape.”

Lynn Gumpert adds, “The Grey Art Gallery takes great pride in partnering with the Barjeel Art Foundation. It is very appropriate that, as a university museum, the Grey broadens vistas and looks closely at art made over the four decades in question by individuals that come from so many different nations, with different belief systems and histories. We chose an exhibition title, Taking Shape, that recognizes and conveys to the public that our approach to abstraction in the Arab world is not static—even with regard to the art of this defined time frame—but is, rather, in formation.”

A major facet of abstraction in the Arab world is linked to a fascination with the artistic and formal potential of the Arabic letterform. In a departure from classical Islamic calligraphy, a new art movement called Hurufiyya was born, which engaged with the Arabic language as a visual and compositional element. Formal explorations of Arabic alphabets emerged concurrently in several parts of the Islamic world in the 1950s, and Iraqi artist Madiha Umar is often cited as a progenitor of the movement. Umar’s work features manipulated letterforms, deconstructed and overlaid on top of each other to create curvilinear compositions that echo the swirls and rhythms inherent to the script and the gesture of writing itself. While classical Arabic calligraphy is traditionally associated with religious Islamic texts, Hurufiyya artists transformed Arabic letterforms into abstract compositions that could be more readily appreciated by diverse audiences. As scholar Nada Shabout notes, “Liberating the [Arabic] letter from calligraphic rules detached it from the sacred and allowed it to be seen for its plastic qualities.” Yet many artists, including Egyptian Omar El-Nagdi and Sudanese Ibrahim El-Salahi, did not completely divorce themselves from religious or spiritual undertones. El-Nagdi’s artistic explorations between the early 1960s and late 1970s were inextricably linked to Islamic thought and Sufi rituals, characterized by rhythmic abstractions that bear formal semblance to the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, alif, also the first letter in the word Allah (god). El-Salahi’s rhythmic articulation of Arabic alphabets and abstraction of African sculptural forms in his 1964 work The Last Sound references the final sound of a soul’s passage from the corporeal plane to the spiritual plane, and underscores the artist’s commitment to creating art through a spiritual process. Distinct from other artists presented in the exhibition, the Palestinian painter Kamal Boullata engaged not just with individual Arabic letters, but whole phrases, which were often well-known verses derived from Islamic and Christian sacred texts.

New artist groups arose across the Arab world during this period to address the issue of how to localize and recontextualize existing 20th-century modernisms. The Baghdad Group for Modern Art, founded in 1951, sourced Mesopotamian archeological objects and locally-found motifs—such as ancient cuneiform symbols—to inform their aesthetic. Shakir Hassan Al Said, one of the group’s most prominent members, also displayed an affinity with Hurufiyya. In the 1960s, when Al Said become interested in Sufism and the spiritual potentialities of art, he published the “Contemplative Art Manifesto,” in which he advocates for a meditative and transcendental approach to art. Al Said’s work during this period manifests his practice of scratching, carving, burning, and otherwise altering the artwork surface to create amorphous compositions that appear to reference the cosmos itself.

The Casablanca School in Morocco, an avant-garde artist collective founded in 1965, promoted inquiry into local heritage to cultivate authentic visual languages and material palettes suited to their cultural and political contexts. Formed by artists including Mohamed Chebaa, Farid Belkahia, and Mohamed Melehi, among others, the school’s philosophy centered on its commitment to the study of local Islamic and Amazigh culture, which its members saw as inherently tied to nonrepresentational modes of expression. Through examination of Morocco’s traditional geometric painting, engraving, mosaic ornament, and carpets, as well as Islamic patterns and Amazigh tattoo symbols, the Casablanca School’s turn to abstraction was driven by a desire for a methodology that had historical relevance and recalled the local culture that existed prior to colonization. Chebaa’s highly geometric works evoke architectural plans and schematized topographies; his 1970s work Composition is rendered as a wooden relief sculpture, underscoring the school’s link to artisanship and crafts. Belkahia turned to the craft traditions of the medina for his work, using natural dyes painted on vellum and animal skin rather than oil on canvas to create his contemplative compositions. The brightly colored curvilinear compositions of Melehi reflect both the form and movement of sea waves and the gesture of inscribing Arabic calligraphy.

Similar to that of the Casablanca School, the work of the Aouchem group based in Algeria sought to reinterpret local symbolism and body art through abstract compositions. The group, whose name means “tattoo” in Arabic, was active for a short period from 1967 until 1971. While not a signatory of the Aouchem manifesto, Mohammed Khadda echoed the group’s central ideas of contemplating the mystical dimensions of runes and symbols of Amazigh culture. His works feature graphic signs evocative of calligraphic pictograms, painted over a surface of earth tones.

For many 20th-century artists in the Arab world who were making nonfigurative work, geometry and mathematics were guiding principles. These artists often drew inspiration from Islamic decorative patterns, architecture, carpets, and textiles.  Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair developed her own unique language of abstract, interlocking forms that had no specific reference to objects, place, or language. Choucair’s geometric canvases and organic sculptures reveal a deeply intellectual and holistic approach that combines influences from mathematics, philosophy, science, architecture, and spirituality. As Suheyla Takesh notes, “Mathematics served as a practical tool for artists in search of these paragons, both for its precision and for its potential to curtail human error.” The geometric still lifes by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, produced following the artist’s trips to Egypt, Syria, and Turkey in 1966 to study Islamic architecture and geometric design, explore how the color of painted volumes affects the illusion of depth. Lebanese artist Saliba Douaihy, a contemporary of Choucair’s who emigrated to the U.S. in 1950, produced hard-edged and brightly colored geometric compositions that were also influenced by landscape. Douaihy cites the Mediterranean Sea as a source of inspiration for many of his minimalist abstract paintings. Etel Adnan, another Lebanese painter, also created works influenced by landscape, particularly locations that held personal significance. Writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie notes the significance of abstracted landscapes among these artists: “It may be the Arab world’s particular take on the art of landscape that it must be abstracted because it has been lost—lost to Adnan and Douaihy, lost more recently to generations of Palestinians and Iraqis and Syrians.”

Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s

Exhibition Catalogue: Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s is accompanied by a 256-page publication. Co-published by Hirmer Publishers and the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, the book was co-edited by Suheyla Takesh, Curator at the Barjeel Art Foundation, and Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. Also featured are essays by Iftikhar Dadi, Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Studies department and Director of the South Asia Program, Cornell University; Salah M. Hassan, Goldwin Smith Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture, Director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University; Hannah Feldman, Associate Professor of Art History, Northwestern University; Anneka Lenssen, Assistant Professor in the History of Art department, University of California, Berkeley; Salwa Mikdadi, Associate Professor, Practice of Art History, NYU Abu Dhabi; Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation and lecturer and researcher on social, political, and cultural affairs in the Arab Gulf States; Nada Shabout, Professor of Art History and Coordinator of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative (CAMCSI), University of North Texas; Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, a writer based in Beirut and New York; and Suheyla Takesh. The book also includes biographical entries on each artist.

Tour: After debuting at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, Taking Shape will travel to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, where it will be on view from April 28 through July 26, 2020, and then to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University from August 22 through December 13, 2020. In 2021 the exhibition will travel to the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, where it will be displayed from January 25 through June 6, and will shortly thereafter be on view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art from June 25 through September 19, 2021.

GREY ART GALLERY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003

greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Iranian Modern Art at Grey Art Gallery, NYU - Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture

Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture

Grey Art Gallery, New York University 

September 18 – December 7, 2002

A groundbreaking exhibition, Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture examines three discrete but interrelated aspects of Iranian art of the 1960s and 1970s.  Co-organized by New York University's Grey Art Gallery and Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Between Word and Image presents over 100 rarely exhibited works—fine art, revolutionary posters, and black-and-white photographs. Introducing American audiences to modern Iranian art, Between Word and Image also sheds light on the many ways that visual culture both reflected and affected the 1960s and 1970s, two decades which saw dramatic changes, such as the politicization of Islam and the 1979 Revolution.

The first section of Between Word and Image features approximately 30 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the Grey Art Gallery's unparalleled collection of modern Iranian art. Adopting an increasingly social role, Iranian modern artists grappled with questions of how to reconcile their contemporary sensibilities with their Iranian heritage. Inspired by classical Persian poetry, calligraphy, and miniature paintings, they also appropriated images of Shiism, the dominant form of Islam in Iran. Also exhibited are 34 striking black-and-white photographs from the 1970s by Abbas, an Iranian photojournalist living in Paris and a member of Magnum Photos, the world-renowned collective. The exhibition concludes with a selection of revolutionary posters by both professional and amateur artists who merged calligraphy, graphics, and rhetoric in order to convey abstract ideologies. These three elements—art, photographs, and posters—furnish an important opportunity to rethink the notion of modernism in a non-Western culture.

Shiva Balaghi, Associate Director of the Kevorkian Center, observes, "The construction of modernity in Iran was an act of resistance and creation. It entailed seeking out new ways in which the arts could engage social and political concerns. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian visual artists began to appropriate the traditional role of the poet as Iranian society's conscious and all-seeing critic. In this sense, Iran's visual culture of this period is an archival record of the social and political problems that were emerging; it serves as the artistic pre-history to the Iranian Revolution of 1979."

"The arts serve as a testament to creativity as well as a historical record of upheaval and crisis," notes Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery. "Between Word and Image allows us to learn more about modern Persian art and to begin to understand how a country that was heralded as a paragon of universal modernization underwent an Islamic Revolution whose message was steeped in localized imagery demanding an idealized return to the past."

The modern Iranian works housed at the Grey Art Gallery—part of the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Asian and Middle Eastern Art—comprise the largest public holding of Iranian modern art outside of Iran. Amassed by Abby Grey on numerous trips to the Middle East and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s to promote artistic exchange, the collection includes major early works by the most prominent Iranian artists such as Siah Armajani, Parviz Tanavoli, and Hossein Zenderoudi. One work, Sealed Letter, a 1964 drawing by the noted large-scale public sculptor Siah Armajani, who now lives in Minneapolis, links calligraphy with the highly revered tradition of Persian poetry as a form of social critique. As in Heech, 1972, by sculptor Parviz Tanavoli, the abstract forms simultaneously constitute both word and image. In addition to featuring the Grey's holdings of Iranian art, the show includes several key works lent by New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The second section of the exhibition features photographs by Abbas that provide critical information about Iran in 1970s, when he returned to his native country to produce a photo-essay examining the social and economic changes brought on by the country's rapidly expanding oil industry. One visit coincided with the outbreak of the Revolution. Between 1978 and 1980, Abbas took hundreds of photographs, providing startling and vivid views of Tehran and its citizens caught up in the throes of a whirlwind. Some have become iconic images. An avid diarist, Abbas views his writing as an integral part of the process of making pictures. The show at the Grey juxtaposes excerpts from Abbas's diaries with his photographs, recalling the Persian tradition of illuminated manuscripts. As Balaghi notes, "As in that tradition, Abbas's words and his pictures can stand alone, but they develop a more textured meaning when taken together as a single art form."

Finally, the Iranian revolutionary posters shown in Between Word and Image offer another fascinating glimpse into modern Iranian visual culture. Composed of bold forms and intense colors, such as red (identified with Marxist liberation movements) or green, black, and red (significant in Islam), and usually incorporating calligraphy, these posters were ubiquitous throughout Tehran during the uprising. Made between 1978 and 1980, they were used as props in mass, choreographed street demonstrations and also covered the many walls of Iran's cities, often defacing public monuments built by the Pahlavi regime as symbols of its authority and grandeur. As government agents tore them off or covered them with paint, protesters would replace them with replenished supplies. Many of the posters allude to battle scenes from the Koran or classical Persian poetry. In one image, the raised arms of defiant militants merge with calligraphy proclaiming a defiant slogan, "There is only one God," against a vivid red background that both signals bloodshed and alludes to the red tulip, an icon of classical Persian literature. In another, an anonymous artist juxtaposes a black-and-white silkscreened portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeini against an abstract, brightly colored background, clearly referencing the work of American Pop artist Andy Warhol, whose portraits of the Shah and the Queen hung in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Still others collaged newspaper images by photojournalists such as Abbas. Here art, reportage, poetry, and politics became enmeshed in a distinct form of visual culture.

As Fereshteh Daftari, a co-curator of the exhibition, observes, "Iranian modernism, like many of the culturally specific modernisms that emerged around the globe, was not synonymous with the one constructed in the West. Both nationalist and internationalist, it looked inward as well as outward. In art its languages included realism and abstraction, but formal issues were not its primary problems: the fundamental questions addressed by Iranian modernism had to do with the notion of identity." 

Between Word and Image was co-curated by Lynn Gumpert and Fereshteh Daftari in consultation with Shiva Balaghi, Peter Chelkowski, and Haggai Ram.

GREY ART GALLERY, NYU

www.nyu.edu