Arab states have been increasingly visible on the international art scene in the last few years, pouring wealth into auction houses and building museums like they’re going out of style. But the art of their own larger cultural sphere still hasn’t gotten its fair share of all that new attention — at least not in New York.

It’s too big a topic to cover in a single show, but you’ll find an exciting introduction in “Taking Shape: Abstraction From the Arab World, 1950s-1980s” at Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Focusing on the tumultuous few decades of decolonization and nation-building, the curators Suheyla Takesh, of the Barjeel Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, and Lynn Gumpert of the Grey have brought together 90-odd prints and paintings by Arab, Berber, Jewish and other artists from Algeria to Iraq.

Most of these artists had some European or American training, and alongside unusual sandy palettes and a few unexpected details, you’ll see plenty of approaches that look familiar: lucid colors à la Josef Albers, crimson bursts of impasto similar to early Abstract Expressionism. But unlike European artists, they also have an alphabet with an ancient history in visual art — and this gives their abstraction a very different effect.

For Madiha Umar, who was born in Syria and studied at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, Arabic letters were a vehicle of secular identity, a way of making Western painting her own. The bustling blue and red swooshes in an untitled 1978 watercolor clearly recall letter forms as well as ancient Mesopotamian crescent moons. But the way the crescents are organized, back and forth across the paper’s edges with an almost narrative motion, makes you think of writing, too.

But the letters retain the religious associations of scripture for the Egyptian artist Omar el-Nagdi, particularly alif, a sharp vertical stroke like a lightning bolt that starts the alphabet and the Arabic word for God and occasionally stands in for the numeral one. A cloud of these overlapping vertical marks, some long and jagged, some slightly curved, in an untitled off-white painting from 1970 offers a mystical vision of divinity immanent in all the world’s separate beings. It’s also a mystical vision of painting itself, one in which every brush stroke retains its infinite potential even as they all merge into a single picture.

Shakir Hassan al-Said’s “Al-Muntassirun” (“The Victorious”), from 1983, a multimedia on panel work that looks like a section of much-abused wall, raises the shimmering ambiguity of el-Nagdi’s alifs to an even dizzier height. A black stripe across the bottom of the otherwise gray rectangle gestures discreetly at the notion of a horizon, while a series of grids and scribbles above it feel as spontaneous as graffiti. Floating over all this, in what looks like black spray paint, is one chic loop. A mark so simple that it can stand for the idea of mark-making in general, it also happens to be the letter waw, which means “and.”

Red, blue, orange and black lines scraped into another off-white surface are crowded with vertical dashes like so many sutures in an untitled 1977 oil by Wijdan, the Jordanian princess who signs paintings with her given name. Each little dash, like a letter, insists on its granular distinctness, whatever their overall effect. The Palestinian scholar Kamal Boullata added high-concept verbal content to cool but gorgeous silk-screens, like the 1983 “La Ana Illa Ana” (There Is No “I” but “I”), a riff on the Muslim credo “There is no God but God.” Working in the 1960s, the Lebanese artist Saliba Douaihy painted with bright colors and sharp lines. But in two small canvases included here, he pushed almost all the action toward the edges — like Madiha Umar’s watercolor, they unmistakably recall the irregular vertical movements of cursive writing.

Because you read letters and images differently, all these marks that look like letters but aren’t quite legible trigger a buoyant feeling of open-ended possibility. It’s as if you’re inhabiting the artist’s own brush as it hesitates between writing and drawing. At its best, as in Al Said’s “Al-Muntassirun,” this feeling stands in for and encompasses so many contrasts — local versus pan-Arab identity, civil versus religious society — that a single canvas becomes an open portal to the infinite.

Fittingly enough, it’s the Moroccans Ahmed Cherkaoui and Jilali Gharbaoui who wield this potential to its most electric effect with paintings inspired not by Arabic itself but by the North African Tifinagh alphabet. Glowing spots of color, in Cherkaoui’s “Alea” and “Les Miroirs Rouges,” are divided by the thick black or rosy lines of a complex crisscross pattern similar to the Tifinagh letter yaz, which appears on the Amazigh (or Berber) flag. The effect is to overload your eyes, as if the blank paper under this review had come alive with a blaring message of its own.

Gharbaoui’s searing 1969 “Composition,” meanwhile, uses heavy black loops and bends to separate impastoed explosions of unmixed yellow and white that look like eggs hot off some heavenly griddle. All the ambiguities remain — is it a letter or a drawing? Is it figurative or abstract? Do those bursts of red express joy or despair? But somehow Gharbaoui made them as solid as rock.

Taking Shape: Abstraction From the Arab World, 1950s-1980s

Through April 4. Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, Manhattan; 212-998-6780, greyartgallery.nyu.edu.