Important Notice

"I cannot seek form without. It has to come from within." - Nasreen Mohamedi

Nasreen Mohamedi painted only a few canvases in her remarkable career, and by the 1970s had ceased working with the easel altogether. Her aesthetics progressed to a delicate and minimalist sensibility when she made a complete shift to paper as her material of choice. Her increasingly fragile health was reflected in the ephemeral creations with which... "I cannot seek form without. It has to come from within." - Nasreen Mohamedi

Nasreen Mohamedi painted only a few canvases in her remarkable career, and by the 1970s had ceased working with the easel altogether. Her aesthetics progressed to a delicate and minimalist sensibility when she made a complete shift to paper as her material of choice. Her increasingly fragile health was reflected in the ephemeral creations with which she is most identified today. The present lot is important not just for the medium but also for its language and experimentation with technique at a time when Mohamedi was in close contact with V S Gaitonde at the Bhulabhai Centre in Bombay, where they shared a sensibility for abstraction.

Like Gaitonde, Mohamedi's work, including this early canvas, intrigues by invoking that which is absent. "Nasreen's works in the early 1960s, especially her canvases, retained the texture of being washed by the sea, cleansed of all excess, with only a few apparitions of perceptible forms. The opaqueness of the oil paint was amply diluted to bring upon the translucent mistiness of watercolour and delicately register a few faint traces of the physical world." (Roobina Karode, Nasreen Mohamedi: Waiting Is a Part of Intense Living, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016, pp. 23 - 24)

This large canvas is one of the strongest examples of Mohamedi's experiments with what was termed 'lyrical abstraction' during this decade. The paintings from this period are considered the "most agitated works in her entire oeuvre," according to critic Roobina Karode. Art critic and author Deepak Anant writes of Mohamedi's aloof expressiveness, which can be seen in the present lot. "The restrained palette of mostly grey and earth tones... thin applications of watercolour or oil paint that do nothing to dissimulate the off-white ground of the paper or the canvas - contribute to the somewhat weather-beaten and yet faintly febrile aspect of these works." (Karode, p. 252)

Mohamedi was one of the first Muslim women in modern India to pursue a career in the arts. 1960 was a crucial decade in the artist's life. She returned to India after studying painting at the St. Martin's School of Art in London, and took part in her first exhibition with Gallery 59 in 1961. Soon after, she was awarded a French scholarship to study in Paris at Monsieur Guillard's atelier. When Mohamedi returned in 1963, her personal life had been through much upheaval, and most of her works and writings from this point forward reflected a sense of despair that she constantly struggled to conquer. During this period, Mohamedi travelled to Turkey, Iran, Karachi, and Bahrain. The desert landscape, with its vast, scale-less expanses made a particular impact on her art. Around this time, in a letter to Krishen Khanna when the latter was in Ravensdale, Shimla, Ram Kumar wrote of Mohamedi: "Today I was surprised to find Nasreen in my studio... She is the most talented woman artist of our country. I wonder if you are well acquainted with her work." (Critical Collective, online)

Mohamedi, who died in 1990 at the age of 53, has in recent years gained wide international acclaim for being ahead of her time, though her oeuvre defies convention and continues to remain somewhat enigmatic. A 2015-2016 multi-city exhibition of her work - a collaboration between the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof??a in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York - set her clearly among the leading non-western abstract modern artists - and a woman - to boot. The present lot was highlighted for publication by her family in the 1995 book, Nasreen in Retrospective. It is one of the few known Mohamedi oil on canvas works and offers a rare and unusual glimpse into a fleeting phase in the elusive artist's creative journey. True to her nature, she rarely provided clues to the orientation of her works, leaving interpretation to the individual.

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