Engaged with Traditional Islamic Art

Art that takes up calligraphy, geometric pattern, tilework, carpets and manuscript painting from the Islamic world.

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About

‘Islamic art’ is a convenient label for a vast range of work made from Spain to Indonesia since the 7th century, much of it secular: calligraphy, geometric and floral ornament, tilework, carpets, metalwork and illustrated manuscripts. Artists adapt these disciplines to new ends. Henri Matisse, after visiting a large exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910, flooded his interiors with carpet-like pattern.

In the mid-20th century the Hurufiyya tendency across the Arab world turned letters into abstract form, and Iran's Saqqakhaneh artists, among them Charles Hossein Zenderoudi and Parviz Tanavoli, drew on popular Shi'a votive objects and script. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian revived mirror mosaic in faceted geometric reliefs. Today Nja Mahdaoui composes illegible, dancing Arabic letterforms, Aisha Khalid brings the precision of miniature painting to pattern and pins, and Dana Awartani practises traditional geometry and illumination, once sweeping away a patterned floor of coloured sand.