Writing with pictures from cave walls to modern experiences
A painting by the painter Shaker Al Said in the exhibition (media service of the exhibition)
The relationship between calligraphy and abstraction in an international and Arab exhibition hosted by Louvre Abu Dhabi
The relationship between writing and abstraction is a close and ancient one, dating back to how the language transformed into an image. Humans persisted in their reduction of the image over time until the ties of connection between it and the action to be expressed became distant, but the image was never absent from the human imagination in its quest for communication and codification.
This relationship between image and writing is the focus of the exhibition, which will be hosted by the Louvre Abu Dhabi until mid-June, under the title "Abstraction and Calligraphy... Towards a Universal Language." The exhibition is a rare opportunity to discover an important aspect of the works of major Western artists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Juan Miro, Andre Masson and Jackson Pollock, as well as prominent Arab artists such as Diaa Azzawi, Shaker Hassan Al Said, Mona Hatoum and Al-Zawi, with a historical comparison between what they and others produced and what they presented. Ancient civilizations used the image in expression and writing, and the influence of each on the other.
International museums
The works participating in this exhibition were brought from art institutions around the world, such as the Center Georges Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum, and many other cultural institutions, and some of them are shown for the first time to the public. What unites these participating names is their remarkable experiences in the aspect of abstraction and their inspiration for the spirit of writing in their works, this spirit that looks at writing as human creativity based on abstraction and symbolism. Some of them dealt with writing directly, while its spectrum represented a motive for creating a different mode of expression for others through the abstraction of image and form.
Painting by Paul Klee (media service of the exhibition)
Exhibition coordinator Didier Ottinger, assistant director of the Georges Pompidou Museum of Contemporary Art and responsible for its cultural programs, sheds light on this close relationship between image and writing by linking the first attempts at writing and codification in ancient civilizations and image-related practices in our time, such as drawings. Depictions of street artists, for example, or emojis associated with Internet culture, or what is known as emoji. How do these ancient ideas about symbolism intersect with our view today and intersect with modern and contemporary artistic practices? And how did this human tendency extend and continue without interruption, from writing and drawing on the walls of caves to the present day? It is a journey through time and space in search of the source of this human inspiration.
Curator Didier Ottinger is an art director with a distinguished career, having curated several major exhibitions at the Pompidou Center and beyond, holding prestigious positions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Canada, and was assistant curator at the Centenary of the Venice Biennale. Ottinger has also taught contemporary art at the Louvre School of Graduate Studies for years, and has a collection of critical books on art history.
close relationship
Through the panel discussion in which Ottinger participated and was broadcast on the Internet, the curator of the exhibition believes that there is a close relationship between written language and images. Writing with images is not only an ancient concept, but it is also a matter of contemporary interest. East and West. This relationship between the concept and perception, or the thing and its concept on the one hand and its image on the other hand, as Ottinger says, when they are mixed, we can deduce the goal of human expression as well as artistic expression. In every step of the development of any culture, we have writing with pictures at the beginning, as in civilization Sumerian, Egyptian and many ancient cultures and civilizations. Therefore, this exhibition opens horizons for referring to these matters related to the history of human language in general.
Painting by Joan Miro (media service of the exhibition)
The exhibition touches on some important turning points in the history of art that are consistent with its central idea, such as the relationship between Kandinsky and Paul Klee with abstraction, and the impact their experiences and opinions had on modern and contemporary artistic practices more than a hundred years ago. The first book devoted to abstraction was written by Kandinsky in 1913 explaining his view of new practices based on shorthand. Ottinger believes that this transformation, in which both Kandinsky and Paul Klee participated, was directly related to the idea of linking between East and West, as there was an overwhelming desire at the time to abandon ancient traditions, accompanied by an increasing interest and desire to look at other cultures. Both Kandinsky and Klee went to the East for this goal, and they made frequent visits to both Tunisia and Morocco, and they held an important joint exhibition in 1910 that collected their works that were influenced by these visits.
In the framework of the link between image and writing, the exhibition also refers to surrealism that appeared in the twenties of the last century, and how its emergence was associated at the beginning with a group of poets and writers who saw that poetry represents the elite of human expression, and their view of art was affected by this conviction, as they considered that the new practices in art A kind of poetry that aims to build a new mythology that is open to all. In the modern traditions of poetry, as the curator of the exhibition says, we can see the desire of poets to return to the image, not necessarily to the depicted representation, but to the image itself, and perhaps the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, one of the poles of symbolism in poetry, is the most prominent example of this. He had attempts to write a poem that you have to see with your own eyes and deal with the space written on it to realize its value.
This combination of experiences and creative contributions included in the exhibition takes us to delve anew into the issue of defining the image and form that are the focus of research in this exhibition, in the context of a dialogue linking artists from different eras and cultures. It represents one of the most important exhibitions organized in the Arab world during the recent period, as it allows it to link the contributions of Western and Eastern artists and sheds light on the points of contact and inspiration between them.
Source : websites