Out of the Depths of Abraham’s Children: Nonrepresentational Art in the Jewish and Islamic Worlds

This exhibition responds to the concept of De Profundis from multiple perspectives, and features artists who have engaged with and expressed this theme specifically through nonrepresentational abstraction. The art presented here is born from personal or collective traumatic experiences in which profound pain, trauma or struggle have become a source of creative transformation. Also featured is art inspired by a quest for spiritual ascent – an aliyah – a transition from the mundane (khol) to the sacred (kodesh): from aspiration to elevation. Works by contemporary artists are accompanied by the narratives that connect individual journeys to the broader evolution of nonrepresentational abstraction over the course of the past century. Given the strong inclination toward abstraction in both the Jewish and Muslim visual worlds – a function of a shared understanding of the sacred as a realm that does not assume logical, particularly figurative, form - and given the particularly heightened evolution in Jewish-Muslim relations in the period since October 7, 2023, the exhibition focuses on work by Jewish and Muslim artists. The selected works, marked by beauty and mystery, offer windows into the depths of human emotion, spirituality, and creative exploration. This array is introduced by copies of key earlier works that represent the developing path of visual abstraction. This path evolved from the early twentieth century, when the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts pursued the goal of defining a specifically "Jewish national art", to the early 1950s, when Jewish abstract expressionists were asking how their art conforms both to the definition of "Jewish art" and to Western art in general and how, as Jewish artists, they should respond visually to the Holocaust. Their response lay, in part, in their intense discussions of the spiritual direction articulated in sixteenth-century Tzfat-centered Lurianic Kabbalah. Their work became part of a dedicated and deliberate process of "Tikkun Olam"— repairing the world so broken by two world wars and the explosive realities of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Muslim artists from Iran to Turkey have wrestled with analogous issues pertaining to the struggle of remaining within the visual traditions of Islam while embracing modernity, one expressed in artistic movements from the neo-traditionalist Iranian Sakkakhanah School of art to the One Dimension Group. The complexities of organizing such an exhibition in the contemporary context were palpable in its formation. At a time when, more than ever, it is essential that practitioners of these two spiritual traditions join together to resist the larger realities of hostility, the challenge of attracting the participation of numerous artists, particularly Muslim, was fraught with considerable sensitivity and no little irony. The form of the exhibition thus mirrors its content: personal and communal struggle, trauma, transformation, and spiritual ascent are all mirrored in the process of selecting works that connect the art on the walls to spirituality inherent within the human experience.