Nja Mahdaoui

Nja Mahdaoui treats script like visual music or choreography – a dance of forms on canvas!

• Pioneer of abstract calligraphy
• International trajectory: Tunisia → Rome → Paris → return home
• Deeply aligned with the Hurufiyya movement

Born in 1937 in Tunis, Mahdaoui grew up in a household steeped in visual craft — his mother embroidered on silk, his uncle worked in textiles. In the 1960s, he moved to Rome to study painting and philosophy at the Santa Andreas Academy (1966–68).

Later, he settled in Paris to pursue further study at the Cité des Arts and the École du Louvre.

Mahdaoui’s decision to abandon purely figurative or Western styles in favor of a calligraphic abstraction marks his main transformation. Rather than writing letters, he composes them. His “calligrams” distort, fragment, and re‑imagine letterforms as gestures

This direction places him squarely in the Hurufiyya movement. Hurufiyya artists harness Arabic script as a visual sign. They responded to postcolonial cultural identity by allowing tradition and modernity to cohere.

In Mahdaoui’s case, his encounter with the critic-curator Michel Tapié was pivotal. Tapié introduced him to Art Informel and Japanese/Arab calligraphic gestures. That exposure helped him loosen the rules of script and expand his visual vocabulary.

A representative work is his calligram series (many examples across media). In such works, sweeping curves and controlled density dominate. The movement of letters is poetic. The artwork becomes a dance with rhythm, pause, tension.