1964
Calligraphy, 1964
Armajani’s early calligraphic works represent the first flowering of his long-term interest in probing the links between word and image. In this painting, inscriptions derived from stanzas of Persian poetry and numerical sequences suffuse a white pictorial field. These inscriptions, written in varying styles of calligraphy, form what Shiva Balaghi terms “an illegible, dizzying confluence […]
Sealed Letter, 1964
In this work Armajani explores calligraphic forms, wryly juxtaposing a legible prayer in Arabic at the top with two rows of letters in Arabic script at the bottom.[1] The prayer (“in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate”), known simply as bismillah after its first word, is one of the most ubiquitous phrases in […]