Important Notice

Nasreen Mohamedi was a pioneering modern Indian artist who is best known for her ruled line drawings based on a grid pattern. Mohamedi's work is complex and suggests a wide range of references. Her work expands the boundaries of both Indian and Western modern art, defying easy categorisation, and belongs to a truly international realm.

Mohamedi's works from the 1960s are primarily semi-abstract landscapes, largely created in muted... Nasreen Mohamedi was a pioneering modern Indian artist who is best known for her ruled line drawings based on a grid pattern. Mohamedi's work is complex and suggests a wide range of references. Her work expands the boundaries of both Indian and Western modern art, defying easy categorisation, and belongs to a truly international realm.

Mohamedi's works from the 1960s are primarily semi-abstract landscapes, largely created in muted tonal washes, sometimes with a spurt of colour or elements of collage included. The use of inks and broad, fluid brush strokes recall calligraphy paintings of the Far East. Exploring her interest in minimalism further, Mohamedi's work from the 1970s, based on grid patterns, was stark and highly formal. Painstakingly etched with precision instruments on an architect's table, the artist's approach to abstraction was truly unique on the modern Indian art scene. In the 1980s she broke away from the grid pattern, and began creating diagonal and circular forms on an empty ground. An ethereal sense of delicacy, movement and balance pervades her work.

She has gained international recognition for her singular contribution to abstract art. Reviewing her posthumous solo show at the Tate Liverpool in 2014, Florence Waters writes, "Mohamedi broke away from the mainstream practice of figurative painting in post-Independence India. Her emphasis on minimal linear gestures to create infinite imaginary landscapes and structures exemplifies her desire to, as she wrote in her diaries, obtain 'the maximum of the minimum'." (online, "Nasreen Mohamedi, Tate Liverpool, review: 'mastery of material and form'", The Telegraph, 11 June 2014)

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