Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s

Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s traces the emergence and development of abstraction in the Arab World through paintings and sculpture dating from the 1940s through the 1980s. 

Drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation based in Sharjah, UAE, the exhibition features some 75 works by a diverse group of artists, including Etel Adnan, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Kamal Boullata, Huguette Caland, Ahmed Cherkaoui, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Rachid Koraïchi, and Hassan Sharif, among others. 

Taking Shape reveals how artists moved away from figuration toward a process of simplifying and schematizing reality—an approach initiated by both artist collectives as well as by individual practitioners in the region and the Arab diaspora. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring new scholarship.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.