Writing with pictures from cave walls to modern experiences
A painting by the painter Shaker Al Saeed at the exhibition (the exhibition’s media service)
The relationship between calligraphy and abstraction in an international and Arab exhibition hosted by Louvre
The relationship between writing and abstraction is a close and ancient relationship, dating back to how language was transformed into an image. The origin of writing is to imitate the action by drawing or photographing it, and to express the matter by reducing it according to a visual format. Humans went so far in their reduction of the image over time that the connections between it and the action to be expressed became distant. However, the image never disappeared from the human imagination in its quest for communication and codification.
This relationship between image and writing is the focus of the exhibition hosted by the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum 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 work of great Western artists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Andre Masson, and Jackson Pollock, along with prominent Arab artists such as Dia 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 employed images in expression and writing, and their influence 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 being shown to the public for the first time. 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 views writing as a human creativity based on abstraction and symbolism. Some of them dealt with writing directly, while its spectrum represented an incentive to create a different form of expression for others by abstracting image and form.
Painting by Paul Klee (exhibition media service)
Exhibition coordinator Didier Ottinger, Assistant Director at the Georges Pompidou Museum of Contemporary Art and responsible for its cultural programs, sheds light through this presentation on this close relationship between image and writing by linking the first attempts at blogging and writing in ancient civilizations with practices related to image in our present era, such as drawings. Pictorial images of street artists, for example, or emoji symbols associated with Internet culture, or what is known as emoji. How do these ancient ideas about the symbolic image intersect with our view today and intersect with modern and contemporary artistic practices? How did this human trend 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.
Exhibition curator Didier Ottinger is an art director with a distinguished career, having curated many important exhibitions at the Center Pompidou and beyond, holding prestigious positions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Canada, and was associate curator of the centenary of the Venice Biennale. Ottinger also taught lessons in contemporary art at the Louvre Graduate School for years, and has a collection of critical books on the history of art.
Close relationship
Through the panel discussion in which Ottinger participated and which 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 just an ancient concept, but it is also a subject of contemporary interest. It represents a passage, he says, between image and letter, and it also represents a bridge between East and West. This relationship between 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 combined, 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 images at the beginning, as in civilization. Sumerian, Egyptian and many ancient cultures and civilizations. Therefore, this exhibition opens the horizons of referring to these matters related to the history of human language in general.
Painting by Juan Miró (exhibition media service)
The exhibition addresses some important turning points in the history of art that are consistent with its central idea, such as the relationship, for example, between both 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 dedicated to abstraction was written by Kandinsky in the year 1913 in which he explains his view on new practices based on reduction. Ottinger believes that this transformation, in which both Kandinsky and Paul Klee participated, was directly related to the idea of linking East and West. There was an overwhelming desire at that time to abandon ancient traditions, accompanied by an increasing interest and desire to look at other cultures. Kandinsky and Klee went to the East for this purpose, made frequent visits to Tunisia and Morocco, and held an important joint exhibition in 1910 that collected their works that were influenced by these visits.
In the context of linking image and writing, the exhibition also refers to surrealism, which appeared in the 1920s, and how its emergence was initially linked to a group of poets and writers who saw poetry as representing the pinnacle of human expression, and their view of art was influenced by this conviction, as they considered that new practices in art A type of poetry whose goal is to build a new mythology available to everyone. In the modern traditions of poetry, as the exhibition coordinator says, we can see the desire of poets to return to the image, not necessarily to the pictorial representation, but to the image itself, and perhaps the French poet Stephane 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 mixture of experiences and creative contributions included in the exhibition takes us to delve once again into the issue of defining image and form, which represent the focus of research in this exhibition, within the framework 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 communication and inspiration between them.
Source: websites