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Lot Essay
Zarina: Reading Between the Zarina~CP~Lines
[Zarina's] practice appears calm, quiet, collected, and free of the desire for spectacular effects and monumentality. She seems intent on inviting emotional responses that lead to reflection and self-reflection, forms of sentiment and feeling that catalyze the process of becoming aware of ourselves and our place in the world. It is a sensibility that is shaped by (and is scrupulously attentive to) the social conflicts of our times. Her work displays a distinctive habit of reflection on what it means to be alive and to be human not despite, but precisely in the midst of, the antagonisms and violence that are so omnipresent in our world.
- A.R. Mufti, 2012
With a remarkable career spanning more than five decades and as many countries, Zarina’s minimalist art evades much of the nomenclature intended to conveniently categorize and identify artists. Her work, which straddles the divide between the abstract and the representational, raises questions concerning meaning, stability, endurance, mobility, and the ephemeral nature of the concept of home.
Zarina was born in the university town of Aligarh in Northern India in 1937, a decade before the partition of the Subcontinent and India and Pakistan’s independence from colonial rule. The youngest of four children, Zarina studied mathematics and statistic at Aligarh Muslim University, where her father was a professor of Indian history.
As a child, Zarina visited religious monuments in Delhi and Agra with her mother and medieval architectural sites with her father. Always encouraged to read, she began to explore books on Western art and artists, took drawing lessons and then experimented with painting in her teens. However, Zarina’s introduction to printmaking, a medium that would become her forte and primary channel of expression for the rest of her career, took place in Bangkok, where she moved with her husband Saad after their wedding in 1958. “It was also the first time I saw a print. I had never seen a woodcut in my life. In somebody’s house I saw a Japanese woodcut, and I was fascinated and made up my mind that I wanted to do woodcuts” (Artist statement, L. Liebmann ‘Zarina Hashmi, Visual Artist’, Artist & Influence, New York, 1991, p. 66).
Studying with a Thai artist, Zarina created her first print in 1961. Over the next decade, even after moving back to Delhi, she continued working with woodcuts. Sustained by her love and respect for books, inculcated by her father when she was growing up, Zarina sought to learn other ways in which she could explore paper and mark making. Having read Stanley William Hayter’s 1962 book About Prints and visited an exhibition of prints by Krishna Reddy, one of his students, Zarina was determined to move to Paris and study and work in Hayter’s Atelier 17. By sheer fortune, in 1963, Saad received a new posting in Paris, and in another stroke of luck, Hayter agreed to take Zarina on in his studio.
Between 1963 and 1967, Zarina studied various printmaking techniques with Hayter, took courses at the Louvre, explored their vast holdings of prints, and developed her non-figurative idiom. Returning to Delhi in 1968 after a short stay in London, where she studied at St. Martin’s School of Art, she decided it was time to establish herself as a full-time artist. Informally separating from Saad, Zarina moved into her own studio space, and over the course of the next six years participated in group exhibitions and held a few solo shows of her prints at venues like Kunika Chemould and Gallery Chanakya in Delhi and Pundole Art Gallery in Bombay. This period also included a brief spell in Bonn, where she accompanied Saad on a posting for the last time, and also studied silk-screen printing processes.
After her parents and siblings relocated to Pakistan, Zarina began to think about leaving India as well. Following a year’s stay in Japan in 1974, first on a Japan Foundation Fellowship and then as an assistant to Father Gaston Petit, one of Hayter’s friends, Zarina moved to the United States in 1975. Not approving of Los Angeles, where she first arrived to live with her friend Joan Miller (who had exhibited her work at her gallery India Ink), Zarina moved to New York in 1976. Following Saad’s sudden death in 1977, Zarina wrapped up her affairs in India and, with the help of contacts she had made at Atelier 17, found the apartment that served as her home and studio for the rest of her life.
Since her move to New York, one of the central concepts anchoring the artist’s practice has been the abstracted motif of the house in various forms, both printed and sculpted. Zarina recalls, “I came to it when I needed to put my life in order. I suppose it functioned for me like writing an autobiography might function for a writer. It allowed me to situate myself after I had left the known path laid out for my life and struck out on my own. It was not that I wanted to go back, but I wanted to know who I was and what I had become” (Artist Statement, R. Samantrai, ‘Cosmopolitan Cartographies: Art in a Divided World’, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Vol. 4, No. 2, Bloomington, 2004, p. 177).
In New York, Zarina’s worldview broadened dramatically as she taught papermaking at the Feminist Art Institute and became involved with a radical community of women artists in the late 1970s and 1980s. “I worked on the editorial board of ‘Heresies’ for their issue on Third World Artists. Heresies was a journal of art and politics started by a collective of women artists and the art critic Lucy Lippard. Until then I had no contact with the ‘other’ America: the Hispanics, the Afro-Americans, the native Americans and other discriminated minorities. This was the beginning of a new awareness. I also co-curated a show of Third World Women Artists, Dialectics of Isolation for AIR Gallery in New York” (Artist statement, G. Sen, Zarina, Paper Houses, 2007, p. 11).
As she looked back on her itinerant life in this new context, Zarina began to explore the tenuous presence of geographical boundaries, and the ambiguous definition of words like ‘nation’ and ‘home’ in her prints. The concept of cartography assumed an increased significance for the artist, considering both her youth in pre-partitioned India and her extensive travels and unique conception of nationality and origin. Influenced by the work of conceptual artists like Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Arp as well as the minimal sculptures of Richard Serra, these works distilled complex experiences and intellectual ideas to produce clean, uncomplicated images.
In her sculptures, Zarina’s obsession with formal purity and minimalism takes three-dimensional form, retaining the lyrical essence of the lines that characterize her prints. Through the niches in her paper pulp works and the forms of those she cast and cut in metal, Zarina addresses the tenuous nature of home, a subject now resolutely embedded in her practice. “The notion of home remains immensely important to Zarina at the same time that she is acutely aware of its impermanence and mutability. She speaks, therefore, of a need to create homes for herself that are as much psychic dwellings as actual physical locations in the world. Even as her travels have taken her to lands spanning the globe, Zarina’s gaze has often turned back to the childhood home in India that she was compelled to leave so long ago. Although the artist does not speak of her formative experience in terms of trauma, it might be said that this separation engendered a yearning to revisit this site of rupture and to try to recover and reconstitute, through acts of memory, what had been lost. With a repertoire of simple, abstract shapes that serve as mnemonic devices to trigger connections to her past, Zarina imaginatively returns to the site from which her journeys began, her father’s house at Aligarh” (M. Machida, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary, Durham, 2009, p. 216).
Through portfolios of stark prints like The House at Aligarh (1990) and Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines (1997), in which she combined autobiography and allegory, Zarina found a way to look back on her past and all the journeys she had undertaken, both physical and metaphorical. Writing about her work in 2005, Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker noted, “Zarina’s art is about memory and the tracing of memory through a sophisticated web of charts and maps that embody the remembered, the experienced and the imagined” (M.A. Milford-Lutzker, ‘Mapping the Dislocations’, Zarina, Counting 1977-2005, New York, 2005, not paginated).
Later portfolios like Letters from Home (2004) and Travels with Rani (2008) were deeply personal, while others hinted at larger sociopolitical concerns related to her family’s experiences of migration and dislocation including Dividing Line (2001) and These Cities Blotted Into the Wilderness (2003). Zarina’s “gestures are always spare, generally abstract, and yet richly allegorical. She uses elements that can be explained biographically [...] Yet her work is not restricted to autobiography, nor does its interpretation require that knowledge from the viewer. On the contrary, it is readily available for appropriation, for it engages the viewer through his/her own biography” (R. Samantrai, ‘Cosmopolitan Cartographies: Art in a Divided World’, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Vol. 4, No. 2, Bloomington, 2004, p. 168).
Today, 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, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and La Bibliothque Nationale, Paris. Represented by major galleries in New Delhi, New York and Paris, she was one of the artists selected to represent India at the country’s first official pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. A year later, in 2012, a major retrospective of the artist’s work, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, opened at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, then travelling to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. A second retrospective celebrating the artist’s career, Zarina, A Life in Nine Lines, opened at the Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi, in early 2020.
Zarina passed away in April 2020 following a prolonged illness. Leaving behind a rich artistic legacy, she will be remembered as one of the most important modern printmakers of South Asian origin. Greatly admired by those who knew her, Zarina was a keen observer of society, politics and culture. She will be deeply missed for her playful wit, kindness and generosity all of which were extended to anyone she was acquainted with. Christie’s is honored to present a selection of significant works representing the artist’s career from 1975-2010 in this auction.
Following her marriage to Saad Hashmi, a diplomat from her hometown of Aligarh in 1958, Zarina began to accompany her husband on his postings, marking the beginning of her international travels. Their first relocation, just after their wedding when Zarina was only twenty-one, was to Bangkok. She recalls, “We went to Calcutta and we took a ship to Rangoon and then around Singapore to Thailand. The first things I glimpsed were the golden spires of the temples” (Artist statement, L. Liebmann ‘Zarina Hashmi, Visual Artist’, Artist & Influence, New York, 1991, p. 65).
In this important work from her sculptural oeuvre, made almost two decades after she left Bangkok, Zarina set a pulp of Sanganer paper and mineral particles in one of the casts she made from an assortment of urban detritus found on the streets outside her studio in New York. With its rows of partially gilded house-like niches impressed on the surface, Memory of Bangkok recalls Zarina’s first impressions of the 'golden city' as well as the evolving, fluid sense of home as place, emotion and political concept that she began to feel there. Here, the idea of home is represented in its most basic structural form, using rows of incised geometric elements. Framing them as a grid within a larger rectangular form in turn represents a sense of community, security and belonging.
[Zarina's] practice appears calm, quiet, collected, and free of the desire for spectacular effects and monumentality. She seems intent on inviting emotional responses that lead to reflection and self-reflection, forms of sentiment and feeling that catalyze the process of becoming aware of ourselves and our place in the world. It is a sensibility that is shaped by (and is scrupulously attentive to) the social conflicts of our times. Her work displays a distinctive habit of reflection on what it means to be alive and to be human not despite, but precisely in the midst of, the antagonisms and violence that are so omnipresent in our world.
- A.R. Mufti, 2012
With a remarkable career spanning more than five decades and as many countries, Zarina’s minimalist art evades much of the nomenclature intended to conveniently categorize and identify artists. Her work, which straddles the divide between the abstract and the representational, raises questions concerning meaning, stability, endurance, mobility, and the ephemeral nature of the concept of home.
Zarina was born in the university town of Aligarh in Northern India in 1937, a decade before the partition of the Subcontinent and India and Pakistan’s independence from colonial rule. The youngest of four children, Zarina studied mathematics and statistic at Aligarh Muslim University, where her father was a professor of Indian history.
As a child, Zarina visited religious monuments in Delhi and Agra with her mother and medieval architectural sites with her father. Always encouraged to read, she began to explore books on Western art and artists, took drawing lessons and then experimented with painting in her teens. However, Zarina’s introduction to printmaking, a medium that would become her forte and primary channel of expression for the rest of her career, took place in Bangkok, where she moved with her husband Saad after their wedding in 1958. “It was also the first time I saw a print. I had never seen a woodcut in my life. In somebody’s house I saw a Japanese woodcut, and I was fascinated and made up my mind that I wanted to do woodcuts” (Artist statement, L. Liebmann ‘Zarina Hashmi, Visual Artist’, Artist & Influence, New York, 1991, p. 66).
Studying with a Thai artist, Zarina created her first print in 1961. Over the next decade, even after moving back to Delhi, she continued working with woodcuts. Sustained by her love and respect for books, inculcated by her father when she was growing up, Zarina sought to learn other ways in which she could explore paper and mark making. Having read Stanley William Hayter’s 1962 book About Prints and visited an exhibition of prints by Krishna Reddy, one of his students, Zarina was determined to move to Paris and study and work in Hayter’s Atelier 17. By sheer fortune, in 1963, Saad received a new posting in Paris, and in another stroke of luck, Hayter agreed to take Zarina on in his studio.
Between 1963 and 1967, Zarina studied various printmaking techniques with Hayter, took courses at the Louvre, explored their vast holdings of prints, and developed her non-figurative idiom. Returning to Delhi in 1968 after a short stay in London, where she studied at St. Martin’s School of Art, she decided it was time to establish herself as a full-time artist. Informally separating from Saad, Zarina moved into her own studio space, and over the course of the next six years participated in group exhibitions and held a few solo shows of her prints at venues like Kunika Chemould and Gallery Chanakya in Delhi and Pundole Art Gallery in Bombay. This period also included a brief spell in Bonn, where she accompanied Saad on a posting for the last time, and also studied silk-screen printing processes.
After her parents and siblings relocated to Pakistan, Zarina began to think about leaving India as well. Following a year’s stay in Japan in 1974, first on a Japan Foundation Fellowship and then as an assistant to Father Gaston Petit, one of Hayter’s friends, Zarina moved to the United States in 1975. Not approving of Los Angeles, where she first arrived to live with her friend Joan Miller (who had exhibited her work at her gallery India Ink), Zarina moved to New York in 1976. Following Saad’s sudden death in 1977, Zarina wrapped up her affairs in India and, with the help of contacts she had made at Atelier 17, found the apartment that served as her home and studio for the rest of her life.
Since her move to New York, one of the central concepts anchoring the artist’s practice has been the abstracted motif of the house in various forms, both printed and sculpted. Zarina recalls, “I came to it when I needed to put my life in order. I suppose it functioned for me like writing an autobiography might function for a writer. It allowed me to situate myself after I had left the known path laid out for my life and struck out on my own. It was not that I wanted to go back, but I wanted to know who I was and what I had become” (Artist Statement, R. Samantrai, ‘Cosmopolitan Cartographies: Art in a Divided World’, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Vol. 4, No. 2, Bloomington, 2004, p. 177).
In New York, Zarina’s worldview broadened dramatically as she taught papermaking at the Feminist Art Institute and became involved with a radical community of women artists in the late 1970s and 1980s. “I worked on the editorial board of ‘Heresies’ for their issue on Third World Artists. Heresies was a journal of art and politics started by a collective of women artists and the art critic Lucy Lippard. Until then I had no contact with the ‘other’ America: the Hispanics, the Afro-Americans, the native Americans and other discriminated minorities. This was the beginning of a new awareness. I also co-curated a show of Third World Women Artists, Dialectics of Isolation for AIR Gallery in New York” (Artist statement, G. Sen, Zarina, Paper Houses, 2007, p. 11).
As she looked back on her itinerant life in this new context, Zarina began to explore the tenuous presence of geographical boundaries, and the ambiguous definition of words like ‘nation’ and ‘home’ in her prints. The concept of cartography assumed an increased significance for the artist, considering both her youth in pre-partitioned India and her extensive travels and unique conception of nationality and origin. Influenced by the work of conceptual artists like Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Arp as well as the minimal sculptures of Richard Serra, these works distilled complex experiences and intellectual ideas to produce clean, uncomplicated images.
In her sculptures, Zarina’s obsession with formal purity and minimalism takes three-dimensional form, retaining the lyrical essence of the lines that characterize her prints. Through the niches in her paper pulp works and the forms of those she cast and cut in metal, Zarina addresses the tenuous nature of home, a subject now resolutely embedded in her practice. “The notion of home remains immensely important to Zarina at the same time that she is acutely aware of its impermanence and mutability. She speaks, therefore, of a need to create homes for herself that are as much psychic dwellings as actual physical locations in the world. Even as her travels have taken her to lands spanning the globe, Zarina’s gaze has often turned back to the childhood home in India that she was compelled to leave so long ago. Although the artist does not speak of her formative experience in terms of trauma, it might be said that this separation engendered a yearning to revisit this site of rupture and to try to recover and reconstitute, through acts of memory, what had been lost. With a repertoire of simple, abstract shapes that serve as mnemonic devices to trigger connections to her past, Zarina imaginatively returns to the site from which her journeys began, her father’s house at Aligarh” (M. Machida, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary, Durham, 2009, p. 216).
Through portfolios of stark prints like The House at Aligarh (1990) and Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines (1997), in which she combined autobiography and allegory, Zarina found a way to look back on her past and all the journeys she had undertaken, both physical and metaphorical. Writing about her work in 2005, Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker noted, “Zarina’s art is about memory and the tracing of memory through a sophisticated web of charts and maps that embody the remembered, the experienced and the imagined” (M.A. Milford-Lutzker, ‘Mapping the Dislocations’, Zarina, Counting 1977-2005, New York, 2005, not paginated).
Later portfolios like Letters from Home (2004) and Travels with Rani (2008) were deeply personal, while others hinted at larger sociopolitical concerns related to her family’s experiences of migration and dislocation including Dividing Line (2001) and These Cities Blotted Into the Wilderness (2003). Zarina’s “gestures are always spare, generally abstract, and yet richly allegorical. She uses elements that can be explained biographically [...] Yet her work is not restricted to autobiography, nor does its interpretation require that knowledge from the viewer. On the contrary, it is readily available for appropriation, for it engages the viewer through his/her own biography” (R. Samantrai, ‘Cosmopolitan Cartographies: Art in a Divided World’, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Vol. 4, No. 2, Bloomington, 2004, p. 168).
Today, 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, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and La Bibliothque Nationale, Paris. Represented by major galleries in New Delhi, New York and Paris, she was one of the artists selected to represent India at the country’s first official pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. A year later, in 2012, a major retrospective of the artist’s work, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, opened at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, then travelling to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. A second retrospective celebrating the artist’s career, Zarina, A Life in Nine Lines, opened at the Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi, in early 2020.
Zarina passed away in April 2020 following a prolonged illness. Leaving behind a rich artistic legacy, she will be remembered as one of the most important modern printmakers of South Asian origin. Greatly admired by those who knew her, Zarina was a keen observer of society, politics and culture. She will be deeply missed for her playful wit, kindness and generosity all of which were extended to anyone she was acquainted with. Christie’s is honored to present a selection of significant works representing the artist’s career from 1975-2010 in this auction.
Following her marriage to Saad Hashmi, a diplomat from her hometown of Aligarh in 1958, Zarina began to accompany her husband on his postings, marking the beginning of her international travels. Their first relocation, just after their wedding when Zarina was only twenty-one, was to Bangkok. She recalls, “We went to Calcutta and we took a ship to Rangoon and then around Singapore to Thailand. The first things I glimpsed were the golden spires of the temples” (Artist statement, L. Liebmann ‘Zarina Hashmi, Visual Artist’, Artist & Influence, New York, 1991, p. 65).
In this important work from her sculptural oeuvre, made almost two decades after she left Bangkok, Zarina set a pulp of Sanganer paper and mineral particles in one of the casts she made from an assortment of urban detritus found on the streets outside her studio in New York. With its rows of partially gilded house-like niches impressed on the surface, Memory of Bangkok recalls Zarina’s first impressions of the 'golden city' as well as the evolving, fluid sense of home as place, emotion and political concept that she began to feel there. Here, the idea of home is represented in its most basic structural form, using rows of incised geometric elements. Framing them as a grid within a larger rectangular form in turn represents a sense of community, security and belonging.