There’s something thrilling about the extreme flexibility of the Arabic alphabet. The graphic simplicity of its swoops, loops and dots means that it can be made to look like almost anything, from a rearing horse to a pixelated television screen. But the art of their own larger cultural sphere still hasn’t gotten its fair share of all that new attention — at least not in New York. It’s too big a topic to cover in a single show, but you’ll find an exciting introduction in “Taking Shape: Abstraction From the Arab World, 1950s-1980s” at Grey Art Gallery at New York University. But unlike European artists, they also have an alphabet with an ancient history in visual art — and this gives their abstraction a very different effect.

Source: International New York Times February 20, 2020 15:33 UTC