NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery is delighted to welcome visitors back to its exhibition space Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish and Indian highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Gray collection. This is the first physical exhibition in the gallery since it switched to virtual programs in the spring of 2020, and it will remain open to the public until February 5, 2022.
Modernisms opened in New York in 2019 and visited the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in the United States before traveling to the United Arab Emirates. The exhibition is the second collaboration between NYUAD Art Gallery and NYU’s Gray Art Gallery. A number of works in the exhibition have remained in storage over the past half century and this is the first time many of them have returned to the wider MENASA region.
Abby Weed Gray was a North American collector who made several trips abroad in the 1960s and early 1970s to explore and collect modern art from across Asia. She made eight trips to Iran and four trips each to India and Turkey, where she acquired the prints, drawings, paintings and sculptures that became the core of the Abby Weed Gray collection of modern art from Asia and the Middle -Orient, hosted at Gray Art Gallery at New York University.
Modernisms to NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery sheds new light on famous artists such as Parviz Tanavoli, Fahrelnissa Zeid and MF Husain, and also includes the collector’s personal letters, journals, invoices, catalogs, invitations and photographs from the Abby Weed Gray Papers in the archive from the NYU. The archives make visible how these artists drew on their specific heritages while engaging in global discourses around key questions of modernity.
To visit the exhibition, book a free ticket to reserve a time slot.
For more information, please visit nyuad-artgallery.org.