Influenced by both Western abstraction and traditional Islamic visual culture, Shemza explored the expressive possibilities of language. In Meem he created a stylized version of the Arabic letter (pronounced meem), the first letter of the names of the prophet Muhammad and the artist’s wife, Mary. He reduced the letter to a circle and a line and repeated this shape along ninety-degree axes in the center of the canvas, resulting in four quadrants of vibrant red, each separated by three bands of pale gray-blue. The painterly brushwork across the canvas reveals the artist’s hand in an otherwise restrained study of geometric shapes.
2024
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Calligraphic Abstraction
Gallery 404Hailing from around the world, the artists in this gallery turned to the expressive possibilities of calligraphy in abstract art during the 1950s and 1960s—a period marked, on the one hand, by political independence and newly formed nations, and, on the other, by military dictatorships and the Cold War.
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