Jamil Hamoudi (Iraq, 1924-2003)


Hurrufiya oil on canvas mounted on board, framedsigned "Jamil Hamoudi" and dated "1992" (lower right), executed in 199240 x 55cm (15 3/4 x 21 5/8in).
|Provenance:Property from a private collection, Amman"Now calligraphy for the Arab artist was for centuries a major outlet of creativity: he employed it inventively and in endless modulations to express a powerful aesthetic impulse often associated with 'spiritual' feelings, largely because most of the phrases thus written were of a religious nature.The words were sufficient unto themselves as 'content', the beauty of their meaning being reflected in the beauty of their configuration. With the advent of the one-dimensionist trend in the sixties, calligraphy for the painter had acquired a freedom of form and significance which the old calligraphers would not consider relevant to their sacred. conventional art. Already Madiha Omar, back in the late Forties and early Fifties, had made whole paintings out of individual letters: she was the forerunner of this way of turning the alphabet into a pretext for linear and color compositions. Jamil Hamoudi, away in Paris at the time, brought this new 'script' into his abstract paintings, then gradually, after his return to Baghdad, and especially more recently, made the letter the a raison d'etre of many of his works." - Jabra Ibrahim Jabra