The Shape of Words

Ibrahim El-Salahi, Untitled  1967

Hamed Abdalla, Lost or Escaped  1966

Mirtha Dermisache, Untitled  c.1970

This is one of several ink drawings by Dermisache that look like hand-written letters but are unreadable characters invented by the artist. They make strange the everyday process of reading and writing. Dermisache invites us to reflect on our ability to share complex ideas and experiences through marks on a page. As Argentina moved towards dictatorship, her unreadable writing came to be seen as a way of resisting state censorship through illegibility.

Gallery label, January 2019

Henri Michaux, Untitled Chinese Ink Drawing  1961

Michaux was both a poet and a painter, but he spoke of drawing as a release from words: 'a new language, spurning the verbal'. His drawings are, nevertheless, calligraphic in character, often suggesting indecipherable writing. Between 1954 and 1962 he experimented with working under the influence of the drug mescaline. The early results were obsessively detailed, while the ink drawings show an intense repetition of slashing marks. Michaux described fighting with these blots, likening them to 'insatiable desires or knots of force, which are destined never to take form'.

Gallery label, August 2004

Mark Tobey, Northwest Drift  1958

After studying calligraphy in China and Japan, Tobey developed a technique of painting with rapid brushstokes, which he called ‘white writing’. Northwest Drift is one of several works that reflect his meditative response to landscape. He wrote: ‘Seattle where I painted this picture is a place of virginal winds, air currents and intermingled seasons... Gray skies, gray water make one conscious of this color and I have used a series of gray tones which seem so indigenous to the locale.’

Gallery label, November 2005

Hamed Abdalla, Meditation  1969

Li Yuan-chia, Untitled  c.1954–61

Li Yuan-chia, Untitled  c.1954–61

Mohammed Melehi, Casa  1970

The title of the painting Casa is a common shortening for the city of Casablanca in the artist’s native Morocco. It can be read as an abstracted cityscape, informed by Melehi’s nomadic lifestyle which saw him travelling from Marrakech to Rome, Paris and New York. In the 1960s, during his stay in New York, he had already worked on a series of paintings with titles like New York, Above Manhattan and Sleeping Manhattan that set up a dialogue with the work of American painters such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Nolan and Jules Olitski (whom Melehi met in the early 1960s when the American artist exhibited in Rome at Topazia Alliata Gallery, run by the mother of Melehi’s then wife, Toni Maraini).

Parviz Tanavoli, Poet and Bird  1974

Parviz Tanavoli, Poet Squeezing Lemon  1974

Pierre Alechinsky, The Night  1952

In the upper part of Something of a World the artist transcribed his own poem in mirror-image with both hands simultaneously. The personal quality of hand-writing greatly appealed to CoBrA artists. ‘The important thing,’ Alechinsky wrote, ‘is to discover an inner script ... with which we can explore ourselves organically.’ Alechinsky said that he painted as if he was a spinning-top, unable to control his own movements. This is evident in The Night in which twists and twirls of white on a black ground evoke luminous night forms.

Gallery label, July 2008

Parviz Tanavoli, Nightingale  1974

Maliheh Afnan, Nocturnal City  1987

Li Yuan-chia, Untitled  c.1954–61

Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi, Four Figures Sitting in Paris  1967

Four Figures Sitting in Paris 1967 is an oil painting on canvas that depicts four abstracted, interconnected shapes. Made of broad white elongated lines, delineated by black contours, the figures stand out against a grey and purple background. Their diamond-shaped heads and the multiple lines that make up their slender limbs recall letters of the Urdu alphabet.

Etel Adnan, Key Signs  2017

Key Signs 2017 is an example of Etel Adnan’s ‘leporello’ works, leporello being a book format with folded concertina-style pages. The work combines washes of watercolour with black ink hieroglyph-like forms. While in her other leporello works, Adnan at times has referred to specific texts, such as the poem Assassination Raga (1968), an ecstatic funeral oration for Senator Robert Kennedy written by the American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the earlier Untitled 1970 (Tate T15063), in Key Signs Adnan has developed a visual vocabulary of glyphs that is more explicitly abstract, as the title suggests. She has explained that, for her, ‘Abstract art was the equivalent of poetic expression. I didn’t need to use words, but colours and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.’ (Etel Adnan, To Write in a Foreign Language, 1996, https://www.epoetry.org/issues/issue1/alltext/esadn.htm, accessed 21 December 2018.) The work bridges textual and visual elements within the practice of an artist whose body of work has combined poetry, painting, collage, tapestry, ceramics and film.

Christian Dotremont, [no title]  1975–6

Mirtha Dermisache, Untitled  c.1970

This is one of several ink drawings by Dermisache that look like hand-written letters but are unreadable characters invented by the artist. They make strange the everyday process of reading and writing. Dermisache invites us to reflect on our ability to share complex ideas and experiences through marks on a page. As Argentina moved towards dictatorship, her unreadable writing came to be seen as a way of resisting state censorship through illegibility.

Gallery label, January 2019

Mirtha Dermisache, Untitled  c.1970

This is one of several ink drawings by Dermisache that look like hand-written letters but are unreadable characters invented by the artist. They make strange the everyday process of reading and writing. Dermisache invites us to reflect on our ability to share complex ideas and experiences through marks on a page. As Argentina moved towards dictatorship, her unreadable writing came to be seen as a way of resisting state censorship through illegibility.

Gallery label, January 2019

Mirtha Dermisache, Untitled  c.1970

This is one of several ink drawings by Dermisache that look like hand-written letters but are unreadable characters invented by the artist. They make strange the everyday process of reading and writing. Dermisache invites us to reflect on our ability to share complex ideas and experiences through marks on a page. As Argentina moved towards dictatorship, her unreadable writing came to be seen as a way of resisting state censorship through illegibility.

Gallery label, January 2019

Judit Reigl, Mass Writing  1961

Emerging from Reigl’s interest in action and gesture, this painting shows the result of an intense and concise engagement with materials. She cut directly into a rich black and orange layer in a burst of energy which is held in the paint. ‘I work with my entire body, to my full arms’ reach’, she has explained. Reigl comes from a senior generation of European artists who established a gestural abstraction in the post-war years. Mass Writing was influenced by Surrealist automatism, which she encountered in Paris after escaping communist Hungary in 1950.

Gallery label, May 2008

Anwar Jalal Shemza, Meem Two  1967

Shemza started the Meem series in 1967 as part of an ongoing exploration of calligraphic abstraction. In these works Shemza reconfigures the Arabic letter ‘Meem’ into powerful variations displaying great symmetry and rhythm. The ‘Meem’ refers to the initial letter of the prophet Mohammad so has a religious reference, but as the initial of his wife Mary’s first name, it has emotional significance. At the back of one of his notebooks, Shemza expresses: ‘My work is based on the simplification of three dimensional solid, architectural reality of the decorative element of calligraphy… Calligraphy which gives means to convey your feelings and also produce some aesthetic response.’

Gallery label, October 2015

Saloua Raouda Choucair, Poem of Nine Verses  1966–8

Poem of Nine Verses 1966–8 comprises nine different aluminium forms placed on top of one another to create a vertical sculpture. Its configuration recalls many of Choucair’s earlier works including Infinite Structure 1963–5 (Tate T13262). Each of the forms is of a basic rectangular shape, with soft organic curves that interlock in places rather than sitting squarely on top of one another. As the title suggests, each form is likened to a verse in a poem. The work was produced in Beirut in the artist’s studio by carving a wooden version that was then cast in aluminium.

Li Yuan-chia, Calligraphic Book  1963

André Masson, Kitchen-maids  1962

Mimmo Rotella, With a Smile  1962

In the early 1950s, Rotella began to rip posters away from the walls of outdoor hoardings in Rome, and used them to create elaborate collages. Many of these were film posters but he also used advertisements for appliances and other goods, so that his works became a commentary on the post-war consumer boom. In the studio he would mount the poster fragments onto canvas, rearranging the pieces into new compositions but also stripping away further layers to accentuate their distressed appearance.

Gallery label, March 2010