Louvre Abu Dhabi announces a new exhibition for 2021

There’s always loads to see at Louvre Abu Dhabi, once you get over staring at that roof and taking snaps to blow up your Instagram feed.

In the permanent collection there are loads of amazing artefacts from far back into human history as well as artworks by some of the greatest artists to ever put brush to canvas.

Keeping things fresh, the museum also hosts changing exhibitions to give us more reasons to keep coming back to see what’s on show.

Launching on Wednesday February 17, a brand-new exhibition will be opening at the museum.

Abstraction and Calligraphy – Towards a Universal Language will be on show at the museum until Saturday June 12.

The new exhibition is the second collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and explores how artists merged text and images to create abstract art as well as the establishment of new visual imagery that inspired calligraphy.

A total of 101 works will be on display, on loan from 16 instructions across the world including seven works from Louvre Abu Dhabi’s permanent collection.

Organised into four sections, the exhibition tracks the timeline of abstraction as a new visual language in the early 20th Century to the modern day.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Paul Klee, André Masson, Vassily Kandinsky, Cy Twombly, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock.

The exhibition will also showcase how abstraction influenced local artists including Dia Azzawi, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Ghada Amer, Shirazeh Houshiary, and Mona Hatoum.

“We are emerging from the very difficult past year of 2020, and it is a pleasure to invite the great curator Didier Ottinger to explore the relationship between abstraction and calligraphy, two visual languages, intimately entwined,” said Manuel Rabaté, director of Louvre Abu Dhabi.

“Louvre Abu Dhabi will offer audiences an exploration of a universal language through pictograms, signs, symbols, lines, and other traces of the hands of the artists. This second major collaboration with Centre Pompidou brings their abstract masterworks – of Cy Twombly, Lee Ufan, Vassily Kandinsky, Henri Michaux, Juan Miró, Christian Dotremont, Jean Dubuffet, André Masson, Nasser Al Salem and Brice Marden – here to Abu Dhabi for the first time.

“This exhibition speaks to the strength of our partner network of museums, and the mutual trust we share in the interest of offering access and moments of discovery to our audiences.

“We are ready and waiting to welcome visitors back safely, offering this rare opportunity to see so many abstract masterpieces displayed side-by-side with the numerous global influences that shaped this visual language.”
For more information visit www.louvreabudhabi.ae.