Golnaz Fathi (born 1972) is an Iranian contemporary artist known for her reinterpretation of traditional Persian calligraphic forms. One of the rare women to have reached the highest level of training in this discipline, her choice to readapt this knowledge to bold abstract compositions places her within the third generation of Hurufiyya artists. This movement, characterized by the reconceptualization of traditional Islamic calligraphy within broader principles of modern art, emerged in the late twentieth century and is considered one of the most significant shifts in Arabic art in recent years. As an Hurufiyya artist, Golnaz Fathi is praised, alongside other contemporary artists including Lalla Essaydi (see lot 62), for her use of modern international aesthetics as a way to subvert and transcend Persian calligraphic scripts. In works such as the present painting, calligraphy is only suggested by the technique employed in the handling of the brushstrokes. Golnaz Fathi insists on the use of calligraphy for its abstract pictorial quality rather than its textual value, and therefore strives to bring scripts to their most extreme state of abstraction. Here, Fathi worked with a square-shaped composition divided into a four-quadrants grid, each quarter occupying the space in a different way. Beyond the rough planes of black ink smudged in the corners, one can still observe more controlled lines crawling over the white canvas, enhanced with spills of red ink. The same way Arabic and Persian scripts are somet.mes s heightened by the addition of vowel letters in bright colours, the present work exemplifies how minimalistic aesthetics can encompass a fuller potential of abstraction.