Important Notice

Zarina Hashmi’s body of work has always engaged with the politics of space and its crossings. Mirroring her own extensive travels and the multiple meanings that the word ‘home’ has for her, Hashmi’s work challenges familiar locations like ‘country’, ‘homeland’ and ‘hometown’.

Born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, in 1937, she married in 1948 and moved often with her diplomat husband. Shortly after she married, her family was forced to... Zarina Hashmi’s body of work has always engaged with the politics of space and its crossings. Mirroring her own extensive travels and the multiple meanings that the word ‘home’ has for her, Hashmi’s work challenges familiar locations like ‘country’, ‘homeland’ and ‘hometown’.

Born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, in 1937, she married in 1948 and moved often with her diplomat husband. Shortly after she married, her family was forced to migrate to Pakistan. The partition and its subsequent dislocation of millions affected her deeply. Hashmi has lived in Paris, Tokyo, Bangkok, Bonn, Santacruz and New York, with stints in Delhi and visits to family in Pakistan in between and the concepts of home and migration are ones that Zarina has explored throughout her career. She has always maintained that she carries her home within her and that each place she has lived and visited contributed to this place.

While Zarina’s oeuvre has always been rooted in her own experiences, beginning in the early ’80s, she began to produce works that were far more personal and explored her own relationship with home much more closely. In 1984, she created the wall sculpture Couple of Houses and continued with this line of exploration through the succeeding decades with Hometown in 1987, and Homes I Made/A life in Nine Lines in 1997 (also featured in this auction). The work in this lot was made in 1987, more than a decade after Hashmi had moved to New York where she was heavily influenced by the minimalism of the ’70s. Here, one witnesses many influences at play. Zarina explores the concept of home – homegrown and hometown using her signature minimalistic style. Rough hewn forms with jagged edges, all printed in black, evoke a physical, intellectual and emotional conceptualization of home.

Along with the theme of her works, her process and materials are deeply entwined with the artist’s life. Hashmi hand-carves and hand-presses each of her works and also manipulates and treats the paper herself. Her preferred medium of choice since she first began working, paper has always fascinated her. She has used it in printing, drawing and even sculpture, collecting different types of paper from each of the places she has lived and travelled. She has even experimented with making her own paper and once said, “I looked at paper and just loved it. It’s an organic material, almost like human skin – you can stretch it, mold it – it even ages” (Vibhuti Patel, “Dividing Lines and the Art of the Exile”, The Wall Street Journal, New York, U.S.A, January 25, 2013, p. A21). A recent exhibition exemplifies this idea in its title ‘Zarina: Paper Like Skin’— a retrospective of her work was held at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2012, and traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2013.

Through works like this, Zarina explores both the concept of home as well as her own experience of it. An ever-changing space that she holds inside her, ‘home’ seems to be a place she has constructed throughout her life, through her work. Speaking about her work, during an interview held at the Guggenheim last year, Hashmi said, “What I’ve been creating is my personal anthology… I’m trying to understand how I got here” (Vibhuti Patel, “Dividing Lines and the Art of the Exile”, The Wall Street Journal, New York, U.S.A, January 25, 2013, p. A21).

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site