Untitled

Much like her jottings and diary entries, Nasreen Mohamedi’s photographic practice, which spanned most of her career from the early 1960s onwards, was a largely private pursuit. As Susette Min notes, these photographic prints, which were not exhibited during the artist’s lifetime, can perhaps be read as “personal notebooks that one can turn to for insight into her motivations and cite as evidence of the sustained way in which she looked at the world through an abstract system or structural order of lines, shapes, light, shade, textures and patterns” (S. Min, ‘Fugitive Time: Nasreen Mohamedi’s Drawings and Photographs’, Nasreen Mohamedi, Lines Among Lines, London, 2005, p. 22).

Several of the artist’s early photographs, including the present lot, were shot in barren locations in Bahrain, Kuwait and India. This particular image is likely associated with the trip Mohamedi took to Rajasthan in the mid-1960s, to assist fellow artist Maqbool Fida Husain as the still photographer on his film project, Through the Eyes of a Painter. Travelling through the towns of Bundi, Chittorgarh and Jaisalmer, Mohamedi captured elements of the arid landscape and Rajput architecture through her lens, manipulating the framing and lighting to tease out the nuances of each image. As such, these works did not have a documentary purpose. Rather, they extended Mohamedi’s close examination of the natural and the man-made and her distillation of their basic essence. “The photographs, neither representational nor abstract, are sited in simple encounters of the tangible, pared down to light and dark, seeming to reveal universal truths beyond the logical. Intensely personal, and as controlled as the gaze of the artist, they reach outside the self, to perceive and connect” (Nasreen Mohamedi, Becoming One, Talwar Gallery website, accessed January 2021).

Writing about her photographic practice, the poet and critic John Yau notes, “In her black-and-white photographs, Mohamedi will sometimes resort to high contrast to isolate a form — a black arch, for example — against a bright white ground [...] Running the gamut from light to dark and evoking texture from the immaterial to the material, Mohamedi’s stark, abstract photographs and photograms — which for this artist were a form of drawing — isolate dynamic forms and geometric configurations, a line or lines moving through space” (J. Yau, ‘India’s Nasreen Mohamedi Belongs to Everyone’, Hyperallergic website, 17 November 2013, accessed January 2021).

In 2016, a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work opened at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. This exhibition, which inaugurated the institution’s Breuer outpost, was Mohamedi’s first museum retrospective in the United States, having travelled from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. Speaking about the international significance of Mohamedi’s oeuvre, Sheena Wagstaff, chairman of the museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art noted, “The poignant story of Mohamedi, a relatively little-known but significant artist, reveals a highly individual artistic quest, drawing on historic sources from across the world, alongside her evocative photography as an unexpected form of visual note-taking” (S. Wagstaff, ‘Nasreen Mohamedi’, Metropolitan Museum website, accessed January 2021).