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Lot 62

 

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“I just made my personal life the subject of my art.” - ZARINA

The art of Zarina Hashmi, or simply ‘Zarina’ as she preferred to be known, is deeply autobiographical. Her works are akin to pages from a visual diary, presenting a compendium of recollections from a lifetime spent travelling and relocating. The Indian-born American artist, according to critic Holland Cotter, “turned the history of her peripatetic life into an emotional... “I just made my personal life the subject of my art.” - ZARINA

The art of Zarina Hashmi, or simply ‘Zarina’ as she preferred to be known, is deeply autobiographical. Her works are akin to pages from a visual diary, presenting a compendium of recollections from a lifetime spent travelling and relocating. The Indian-born American artist, according to critic Holland Cotter, “turned the history of her peripatetic life into an emotional and spiritual guide composed of spare images, poetic words and subtle politics.” (Holland Cotter, “Zarina Hashmi, Artist of a World in Search of Home, Dies at 82,” The New York Times, 5 May 2020, online)

It is, perhaps, a result of these experiences that her work continues to remain relevant to the political upheavals of the world we live in, not only because it is a topographical record of her own life and the places she has lived in, but also a record of a much larger landscape of conflict and violence. “Zarina’s work has moved across regions and established communication by using the common right to the face of the earth as her platform.” (Homi K Bhabha quoted in Devika Singh, Zarina: Folding House, New Delhi: Gallery Espace, 2014, online)

Zarina’s exposure to Islamic design and architecture – which partly came from her father, a professor of Mughal history, inculcating this interest in her – as well as her own background in mathematics, formed the structural foundation of her geometric style in later years. However, it is the nostalgic memory of her home, of spending hot summers outdoors under the stars with her sister, that shapes the emotional depth of her art.

Zarina’s choice of medium is equally important as the issues she chooses to represent. Her use of woodcut combined with the inclusion of the Urdu script, and calligraphic and geometric elements reminiscent of Islamic art and architectural forms, evoke a stark and meaningful aesthetic. “For Zarina... ink is not just ink, and paper is not just any old paper. Mounted against the muted, grainy background of Arches Cover or Somerset stock, which is wispy around the edges, each type of image calls for its own variety of handmade paper – from Japanese Kozo to Indian and Nepalese. The artist subjects them all to staining, folding, threading, and puncturing in turn... Even in Zarina’s more overtly two-dimensional works, there is a tension between the fragility and lightness of the materials deployed and the impression of solidity and weight they convey.” (Agnieszka Gratza, “Zarina’s Folding House,” Art Agenda Reviews, 3 March 2014, online) This is evident in lots 62, 63 and 64 where her compositions act as a means of communication between wood, pigment and paper.

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