Important Notice

Often considered a pioneer among artists working at her time, Nasreen Mohamedi came to prominence in the 1950s and her work was only truly recognized after her death in 1990. Her precise, mellifluous abstracts have won recognition worldwide and have been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries in India and abroad. She immersed himself in the abstract following her return to India in the 1960s from London and Paris.

Her line... Often considered a pioneer among artists working at her time, Nasreen Mohamedi came to prominence in the 1950s and her work was only truly recognized after her death in 1990. Her precise, mellifluous abstracts have won recognition worldwide and have been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries in India and abroad. She immersed himself in the abstract following her return to India in the 1960s from London and Paris.

Her line drawings reveal a meticulousness and mathematical precision in their composition. This can be seen as stemming from black and white photographs that she had taken throughout her life, serving almost as blueprints to her drawing. Establishing the link between the composition of her photographs and her drawings, Sasha Altaf observes, "…by the '70s, one could see in Mohamedi's stark 'line drawings' an absence of colour and figurative references. Her visual language pushed her to the forefront of an emerging alternative modernism" ("Monochromatic Musings", ART India, Vol. XII, Issue I, Quarter I, 2007, pg. 68). Art critic Geeta Kapur posits that "Nasreen's work, founded on absence, is about the self. That through a series of displacements she touches and transcends death, but that the insistently elided questions about the self are precisely such that offer up meaning in her work. That she is therefore within a great lineage of metaphysical abstraction in a way that no other Indian artist is" ("Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved: Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990)", The Grid, Unplugged: Nasreen Mohamedi, New Delhi, pg. 2).

The present lot was created in the 1970s, when she was producing many works which explored the relationship between form, line and space and employed these as a tool to explore the self. Writing for the Times of India in 1976, Richard Bartholomew described her line drawings thus: "Nasreen's drawings are of a very special kind. Her intention is to delineate-line by line, and shade by shade, in parallels, obliques and intersections, in pencil or in ink, or with the use of both-the steady but sure build-up of the mass and movement, as experienced visually….lines (horizontally or obliquely drawn, and sometimes intersecting) are 'phased' in millimetre intervals almost; and these phases work as 'wavelengths' which in turn create impulses. While on the one hand such a delineation is intended to test the eye's ability to resolve positive and negative impressions and therefore differentiate between density and movement, on the other hand, what is created is the very real but seemingly illusory presence of spaces and volumes in the intervals between what here and there condense into masses" (February 11, 1976, The Art Critic, Bart, 2012, pg. 574).

Speaking about her work, Roobina Karode says, "Nasreen's commitment to abstraction is inspired by spiritualities as much as it is inspired by Kandinsky, his thesis on the spiritual in art, by Mondrian's world based on theosophy - vertical and horizontal forces, Malevich's ethereal and floating world that professed an ascent from the ground, Gaitonde, in fact, a line from the Upanishad that she would quote - the eternal cannot be grasped by the transient senses or the transient mind. All of these aligned themselves to a non-representational ethics and aesthetics: from the very beginning the orientation to Islam is through the belief in the unseen. In the absence of an externalized form, abstraction becomes the means of articulation - through invocations of its attributes, qualities, through incantation, reverberation" (ARTINFO India Exclusive: Excerpts from Roobina Karode's Talk on Nasreen Mohamedi, May 15, 2013, accessed online).

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