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Lot 50

 

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"Black for me is ink. And creating for me is about understanding the heart of darkness in a world which is black and white." - ZARINA

A life of diplomatic missions took Zarina and her husband to various locations. The criss-crossing of cities and the experience of being in different places and homes, with different people, is reflected in her creative expression. (Kusum Haider, Towards the Light, The Indian Quarterly,... "Black for me is ink. And creating for me is about understanding the heart of darkness in a world which is black and white." - ZARINA

A life of diplomatic missions took Zarina and her husband to various locations. The criss-crossing of cities and the experience of being in different places and homes, with different people, is reflected in her creative expression. (Kusum Haider, Towards the Light, The Indian Quarterly, online) After her husband's death in 1977, Zarina moved to New York City and became involved in the Manhattan art world, particularly with the feminist art movement. It was also around this time in the early 1980s that the themes of home and exile became central to her art.

In 1992, Zarina moved to California and began teaching printmaking at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she would live for another five years. The present lot was made during this time. The set of four etchings, titled Santa Cruz, Monterey Bay, Night Sea and Dark Sea - with text in Urdu, likely from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz - represent abstracted memories of her time in the West Coast city. Here, she uses the rigid formality of light and dark blocks to conjure up the mysterious space of creativity out of which poetry appears, while simultaneously evoking the Pacific Ocean vistas at night. (Glenn D Lowry, Remembering Zarina (1937-2020), moma.org, 30 April 2020, online)

Both lots 49 and 50 were precursors to a seminal portfolio of 36 woodcut prints that Zarina made in 1999 titled Home is a Foreign Place. "Made during a particularly fraught period when the artist faced eviction from her Manhattan loft, the folios in this series are visual responses to words in her native Urdu that conjure multiple senses of home - from the areas of a physical space to the experience of weather in a particular place to the cosmic phenomena that mark the passage of time." (metmuseum.org, online)

Zarina's choice of medium is equally important as the issues she chooses to represent. Her use of woodcut - a medium used primarily as protest art in the works of Mexican political artists and 20th century German Expressionists - 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 twodimensional 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)

In recent years, there has been increasingly great interest in Zarina's work. She was one of the four artists who represented India at the Venice Biennale in 2011. This was followed by a retrospective show of her works titled Zarina: Paper like Skin at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2012, which travelled to the Guggenheim in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Zarina passed away on 25 April 2020, leaving a legacy of "...a life left behind and a life well lived. Her work could be stunningly beautiful and haptic as easily as it could be cerebral and abstract - but it was always meaningful and carefully considered, as she was herself." (Lowry, online)

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