Abu Dhabi: The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s first international exhibition of the year — Abstraction and Calligraphy — Towards a Universal Language — is set to open on Wednesday.
The exhibit invites visitors to explore the dawn of modern abstraction through the exploration of signs and symbols, and traces their origins to Asian and Arabic calligraphy, and to sites of mutual inspiration around the world.
The exhibition will run until June 12, and will bring together 86 pieces, including 80 on loans from partner institutions like the Centre Pompidou, a house for modern and contemporary art in Paris. It will showcase how 20th century abstract artists like Paul Klee, André Masson, Wassily Kandinsky, Cy Twombly, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock felt the need to establish a new universal, visual language that was inspired by calligraphy. The show will also focus on 20th and 21st century Arab artists — from Dia Azzawi and Anwar Jalal Shemza, to Ghada Amer, Shirazeh Houshiary, Mona Hatoum and others — for whom the letterform was a continuous source of inspiration, freeing writing from its purely linguistic function and investing it with new artistic value. Two contemporary artists, eL Seed and Sanki King, will also be featured, demonstrating how artists today are still seeking new visual forms to respond to current societal changes.