Hurufiyya — the letter enters the galleryالحروفية — الحرف يدخل صالة العرض

In the mid-twentieth century, Arab artists asked a heretical question: what if the letter left the page and entered painting? The Hurufiyya movement — from harf, letter — answered across the region: Madiha Umar exhibiting letter-abstractions in Washington in the 1940s, Shakir Hassan Al Said in Baghdad making the letter a mystical field, Dia al-Azzawi, Rachid Koraïchi and others turning script into pure composition. Hurufiyya freed the letter from legibility: a ح could be a wave, an eye, a country. Every time you split a word into glyphs in this studio and twist one into ornament, you are working in their lineage.