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An early pioneer of Algerian modernism, Abdallah Benanteur was committed to abstraction. He believed that the artist should not be compelled to represent the world, but to live in it and engage with it. He moved to Paris in 1953 and titled this work in homage to the French impressionist painter Claude Monet and his famous garden at Giverny. The nativethehavebluecharacteristicpainting’sAlgerian-backgroundmaybeeninspiredbyartist’sloveforhiscountry.” “ Abdallah Benanteur (Algeria), “To Monet, Giverny” (1983, oil on canvas), 47 ¼ inches by 47 ¼ inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE The Block Museum of Art unveils a dazzling new exhibition that explores the wonders of the Arab art scene.
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BY J.P. ANDERSON F rom Morocco and Palestine to Sudan, Qatar, Tunisia, Egypt and more, every fascinating corner of the Arab world is represented in the latest exhibition at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art.
Shape of Things
Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s is comprised of nearly 90 paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints and examines how dramatic societal events—decolonization, war, mass migration, the oil boom and more—were reflected by artists in the region. For us viewers, it also offers a fascinating window into the Arab world’s dazzling variation in terms of culture, language, ethnicity and religion. Here, exhibition curator Suheyla Takesh of the UAEbased Barjeel Art Foundation talks us through some of the show’s most stunning pieces. Sept. 22-Dec. 4, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, blockmuseum.northwestern.edu
During the 1960s, Mohamed Melehi co-founded the Casablanca School, a group of avant-garde artists seeking to develop a new model for artistic practice in postcolonial Morocco. Completed in 1970, this painting reflects Melehi’s approach to abstraction, which aimed to create an authentically Moroccan visual language using traditional decorative patterns. This large-scale, hard-edge painting features curvilinear fields of vibrant color, with the four interlocking waves overlapping at the painting’s center.”
Omar El-Nagdi is best known for his rhythmic abstractions based on the repetition of Arabic letter forms. Here, he repeats the numeral one (wahed), which shares its form with the first letter of the Arabic alphabet (alef). It is also the first letter in the name of God (Allah). He began using this minimal letter form to build his abstract compositions in the 1960s and ’70s. Repeating and layering the same symbol, El-Nagdi creates a pulsating image that channels meditative elements of Sufi practice and references the indivisible nature of the divine.”
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Samia Halaby (Palestine), “White Cube in Brown Cube” (1969, oil on canvas), 48 inches by 48 inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE Omar El-Nagdi (Egypt), “Untitled” (1970, mixed media on wood), 47 inches by 47 inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE Mohamed (1970,(Morocco),Melehi“Composition”acryliconwood), 47 ¼ inches by 39 ⅜ inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE
A Palestinian artist, scholar and art historian, Samia Halaby is known for abstract works that draw on a long-standing fascination with visual perception. Halaby painted ‘White Cube in Brown Cube’ during her exploration of geometric experimentation in the late 1960s. The pareddown canvases investigate how the color and form facilitate illusions of depth and space.”
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A foundational figure in African modernism, Ibrahim El-Salahi creates intricately detailed compositions that draw on Islamic, African, Arab and Western artistic traditions. In ‘The Last Sound,’ seen here, he sparsely distributes muted abstract shapes across a square canvas; the work’s title refers to the Islamic practice of reciting prayers for the dead and dying. Intended to commemorate the death of the artist’s father, the painting evokes the soul’s passage from the corporeal to the celestial as it travels toward heavenly forms inhabiting the universe and beyond.”
“ Mohamed Chebaa was a founding member of the avant-garde Casablanca School, which emerged from the city’s École des Beaux-Arts in the mid-1960s. Seeking to detach modern art from the legacy of French colonialism, Chebaa and his contemporaries strove to relocate it squarely within Moroccan culture. Known for his bold and colorful geometric imagery, Chebaa worked in woodcarving, as well as painting.”
Huguette Caland (Lebanon), “City II” (1968, oil on canvas), 31 ½ inches by 39 ⅜ inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan), “The Last Sound” (1964, oil on canvas), 47 ⅞ inches by 47 ⅞ inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE Mohamed (Morocco),Chebaa“Composition” (c. 1970, wood [bas-relief]), 98 ⅜ inches by 59 inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE
Spanning more than five decades, Huguette Caland’s career was strongly marked by her fierce dedication to freedom and movement. The daughter of Bechara el-Khoury, the first president of independent Lebanon, Caland first trained with in Beirut and then moved to Paris in 1970. Liberated from family and culture, Caland was free to explore an array of disciplines and begin making the abstract paintings and drawings for which she is best known.”
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Kamal Boullata (Palestine), “Al-Zahiral-Batin (The Manifest, The Hidden)” (1983, silkscreen), 25 ¾ inches by 15 ¾ inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE
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Nabil Nahas is best known for his tactile, largescale monochromatic paintings. Primarily an abstract artist, he creates intricate patterns from natural objects, such as starfish and cedar, olive and palm trees. This untitled painting of 1983 derives from a series of black canvases featuring dripped vertical white marks that the artist began painting after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Resulting in death and casualties on both sides, the attack caused a buildup in tension throughout the region.”
An internationally celebrated artist, writer, poet and scholar, Kamal Boullata worked between image and text. He is best known for his vibrant geometric silkscreens and paintings incorporating popular religious verses and proverbs in Sufi and Arabic, pushing their calligraphic forms to the brink of illegibility.”
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Etel Adnan (Lebanon), “Autumn in Yosemite Valley” (1963-1964, oil on canvas), 20 ⅛ inches by 20 ⅛ inches, collection of the Barjeel ArtSharjah,Foundation,UAE
Nabil Nahas (Lebanon), “Untitled” (1983, acrylic on canvas), 47 ¾ inches by 36 inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE Growing up in Lebanon, Etel Adnan was immersed in languages—Greek, Turkish, Arabic and French. After studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, she turned to visual art and to transcribing Arab poets, Sufi poetry and creating vibrantly colored artists books. She painted abstract landscapes in order to ‘humanize the environment,’ and was inspired by the nature of Northern California, where she lived for many years.” “
“ Mohammed Khadda (Algeria), “Abstraction vert (Green Abstraction)” (1969, oil on canvas), 21 ¼ inches by 17 ¾ inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE Saliba Douaihy (Lebanon), “Untitled” (c. 1960-1969, oil on canvas board), 19 ⅜ inches by 23 ½ inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE Ahmed rouges(Morocco),Cherkaoui“Lesmiroirs(RedMirrors)” (1965, oil on jute), 9 ¼ inches by 11 ¼ inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE
Known for his minimalist aesthetic, Saliba Douaihy works in a precise, hard-edge style grounded in his keen interest in color and form. He explores notions of the sublime through the most basic, elemental shapes. ‘Untitled’ epitomizes this practice, which was also deeply inspired by German American artist Josef Albers. Here, his canvas is dominated by a vast swath of blue, but Douaihy creates a nuanced illusion of depth by layering colors—red, yellow, orange—at the edges.”
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“ Saloua Raouda Choucair (Lebanon), “Interform” (1960, wood), 23 ⅝ inches by 12 ⅝ inches by 4 ½ inches, collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE Ahmed Cherkaoui is known for his large canvases and burlap collages, which are both abstract and teeming with symbols. He created a distinctive aesthetic, arranging his vibrant motifs and forms symmetrically against a dark background, enhancing the illusion of depth. Born in Boujad, Morocco, at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, Cherkaoui developed a visual language inflected by his childhood education at a traditional Qur’anic school and by his mother’s Amazigh (Berber) tattoos, used by descendants of the nomadic tribes in North Africa.”
Mohammed Khadda’s quasicalligraphic shapes call to mind pictograms and asemic writing. A true pioneer, during the 1950s, Khadda helped lead a generation of Algerian artists in their quest to combine Arab and Amazigh calligraphy with Western abstraction. Following Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, Khadda and his visualarenewedcontemporariestheireffortstoforgedistinctlyAlgeriannationallanguage.”
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In this wood sculpture, Saloua Raouda Choucair draws upon two essential elements of Islamic design—the straight line and the curve. Dynamic yet balanced, ‘Interform’ is made of solid planes and voids that generate a sense of architectural presence and spatial rhythm. Her transition from painting to sculpture around this time enabled the artist to explore movement and silence inspired by Arabic verse and music.”
