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Stele comparison

As Didier Ottinger, the curator of Abstraction and Calligraphy – Towards a Universal Language explains: “Everywhere, images came before letters: in Egypt, China and Mesopotamia, as in the Americas, the first forms of writing were pictograms and ideograms, or stylised drawings. The advent of letters, of the alphabet, revolutionised writing. The shift from images to the written word inevitably involved loss, as if abandoning images gave rise to a nostalgia for meaning: letters no longer directly carried the meaning conveyed by images. The cost of this shift was a palpable draining of vigour, a dis-incarnation. From the Chinese (写: xiĕ), to the Greek (γγράφγράφειν ράφειν: graphein), via the Arabic ( :ُبُتْكَييَكْتُبُ yaktub), the respective verbs for “to write”, in their etymology, relate to pictures and painting. Western poets and writers taking the path of abstraction turned to non-European civilisations, in particular the Arab world and the Far East.

Blue Quran comparison

As explained by the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Scientific, Curatorial and Collections Management Director, Dr. Souraya Noujaim: “The sources of abstraction that might be said to have dominated 20th-century art are found in the attention that many artists paid to the varied signs, calligraphies and ideograms of non-Western cultures. Beyond the limits of immediate sensory experience, in an environment where letters are everywhere present in declamation, calligraphy and graffiti, Asia and North Africa were intuitively experienced as an essential model. This almost mystical dimension of gesture and letter finds an echo in the Arab Hurufiyya movement, whose importance in the development of contemporary abstraction should not be underestimated”.

Comparison to zoomorphic calligram lion

From Wassily Kandinsky to André Masson, and from CY Twombly to Ghada Amer, the search for the “pictographic”, the exploration of an artistic path between pictures (picto-) and writing (-graphic), runs like a thread through the 20th century.

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