NEW HOME FOR THE GREY ART GALLERY, NYU’S FINE ARTS MUSEUM NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, a Downtown Jewel Among NYC’s Art Museums, Will Move to a Larger Space in Cooper Square, East Village Contact: Allegra Favila greyartgallery@nyu.edu 212/998-6789 [Download Press Release] The Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s widely admired fine arts museum, will move […]
EXHIBITION FOCUSES ON NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S LANDMARK ART COLLECTION Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection March 21–June 17, 2022 Extended through fall 2022 Contact: Allegra Favila allegra.favila@nyu.edu 212/998-6789 [Download Press Release] The Grey Art Gallery at New York University is pleased to present Mostly New: Selections from the NYU Art Collection, the museum’s […]
amNewYork reviews Taking Shape.
The New York Times lists Taking Shape as one of 21 art exhibitions to see the weekend of February 27, 2020.
The New York Times lists Taking Shape as one of 23 art exhibitions to see the weekend of March 5, 2020.
Conceptual Fine Arts recently spoke with Al Qassemi in Boston to discuss his vast collection of Arab modern art, a part of which is accessible in a travelling exhibition, “Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s” that’s on view at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, through April 4, 2020.
I visited “Taking Shape” after “Theater of Operations,” and it was hard not to see the very optimism that permeated so many of these abstract works through the eyes of disillusionment.
Writing in 1964, the Algerian painter Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991) identified “that day in 1910 when the Russian artist [Wassily] Kandinsky created the first nonrepresentational work” as marking the birth of “nonfigurative (or abstract) painting.” (Note: For the sake of consistency, I have used the exhibition curators’ transliteration of artists’ names.)
On the heels of the exhibition “Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection,” which showcased works from the 1960s and ’70s, Grey Art Gallery’s first presentation of the year further widened the lens on 20th-century art from the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. “Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s,” curated by Suheyla Takesh and Lynn Gumpert, represented a joint effort with the Sharjah-based Barjeel Art Foundation to consider modernist movements from the region and the diaspora.
Modern Arab art is having a moment; there is no question about it. In the past decade there have been large exhibitions of Arab artists at both the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern, and a series of others across the world. Now, ‘Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s’, which starts at the Grey Art Gallery in New York and will spend more than a year touring East Coast and Midwestern universities in America, brings together some of the region’s finest modern artists. It is a real hit parade of work – some of it truly wonderful – from almost every country in the Arab world; Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Palestine are particularly well represented.