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Lot 49

 

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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 - has always engaged with the politics of home, displacement and migration, informed by a lifetime of 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... "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 - has always engaged with the politics of home, displacement and migration, informed by a lifetime of 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)

Zarina's works continue to remain germane - even decades after they were made - to the political circumstances of our time. The following two lots made in the 1990s, represent successively expanding physical spaces, from a microcosmic house to the scenic vistas of a city, and are emblematic of the artist's concerns with the concept of home and memory.

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. As seen in the present lot, titled Packed House, "The floor plan of her childhood house, whose walls enclosed a fragrant garden, became a recurrent presence in her art." (Cotter, 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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