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Lot Essay
Zarina's minimalist art raises questions about migration, exile, and the ephemeral nature of 'home'. The artist also explores the tenuous idea of geographical boundaries, playing upon their simultaneous ability to demarcate and divide. The concept of cartographic borders assumes an increased significance for the artist considering both her youth in pre-partitioned India and her unique conception of nationality and origin. Zarina's extensive travels with her diplomat husband through Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia eroded the distinctions between place, home and location for the artist, leading her to call 25 different cities and towns her 'home'.
For Zarina, process, medium and concept are as integral to the success of an artwork as the final aesthetic. Influenced by printmakers like Stanley William Hayter, conceptual artists like Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Arp, and also by the minimalist sculptures of Richard Serra, her work distills complex thought processes to produce clean, uncomplicated images.
In this series of woodcuts, the artist's largest and most significant portfolio, Zarina demonstrates her skills at print-making, acquired while studying the craft in India, Thailand, Japan, Germany and at Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris. Here, Zarina adopts the straightforward medium of the wood block print to express her understanding of 'home', introducing attributes of cartography, Urdu calligraphy, and Islamic art and architecture with an emphasis on geometry and simple patterns.
Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times, describes this portfolio as the artist's "best-known work", demonstrating "how evocative and simple a gesture can be. The shapes are lines, crosses, circles and bars, revealing her long-standing interest in the radical, early-20th Century art of Kazimir Malevich. Installed in a grid, the sequence is something like reading about a journey through a house - not just across a threshold, into a room or looking out a window, but feeling a rush of warm air and glimpsing a shaft of passing light [...] In this quietly compelling suite of prints, the sheet of paper is simultaneously foreign and home. That's a poetic and pertinent place to be." (C. Knight, 'Review: Zarina Hashmi imprints herself in paper', Los Angeles Times, 21 November 2012)
Zarina's works are part of numerous highly esteemed collections including those of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and La Bibliothque Nationale, Paris. Other editions of this important portfolio, which inspired Meena Alexander's poem 'House of Breath', have been shown at gallery and museum exhibitions around the world, and at India's first official pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Editions of this portfolio are also part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York.
For Zarina, process, medium and concept are as integral to the success of an artwork as the final aesthetic. Influenced by printmakers like Stanley William Hayter, conceptual artists like Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Arp, and also by the minimalist sculptures of Richard Serra, her work distills complex thought processes to produce clean, uncomplicated images.
In this series of woodcuts, the artist's largest and most significant portfolio, Zarina demonstrates her skills at print-making, acquired while studying the craft in India, Thailand, Japan, Germany and at Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris. Here, Zarina adopts the straightforward medium of the wood block print to express her understanding of 'home', introducing attributes of cartography, Urdu calligraphy, and Islamic art and architecture with an emphasis on geometry and simple patterns.
Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times, describes this portfolio as the artist's "best-known work", demonstrating "how evocative and simple a gesture can be. The shapes are lines, crosses, circles and bars, revealing her long-standing interest in the radical, early-20th Century art of Kazimir Malevich. Installed in a grid, the sequence is something like reading about a journey through a house - not just across a threshold, into a room or looking out a window, but feeling a rush of warm air and glimpsing a shaft of passing light [...] In this quietly compelling suite of prints, the sheet of paper is simultaneously foreign and home. That's a poetic and pertinent place to be." (C. Knight, 'Review: Zarina Hashmi imprints herself in paper', Los Angeles Times, 21 November 2012)
Zarina's works are part of numerous highly esteemed collections including those of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and La Bibliothque Nationale, Paris. Other editions of this important portfolio, which inspired Meena Alexander's poem 'House of Breath', have been shown at gallery and museum exhibitions around the world, and at India's first official pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Editions of this portfolio are also part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York.