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Nasreen Mohamedi

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Indian artist

Nasreen Mohamedi
Born1937 (1937)
Karachi, British Indian Empire (now Pakistan)
Died1990 (aged 52–53)
Kihim, India
NationalityIndian
Known forPainting, Photography, Collage
MovementAbstract Expressionism

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937—1990) was an Indian artist best known for her line-based drawings, and is today considered one of the most essential modern artists from India. Despite being relatively unknown outside of her native country during her lifetime, Mohamedi's work has been the subject of remarkable revitalisation in international critical circles and has received popular acclaim over the last decade. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, documenta in Kassel, Germany, and at Talwar Gallery, which organised the first solo exhibition of her work outside of India in 2003, Today, Mohamedi is considered one of the major figures of the art of the twentieth century.

Life and career

Born in 1937 in Karachi, India, in what became western Pakistan some ten years after her birth, Mohamedi lived, even from her early years, a cosmopolitan life. She was born into the elite Tyabji family, a Suleymani Bohra family She was one of eight children. Her mother died when she was very young. Her father owned a photographic equipment shop in Bahrain, among other business ventures. Her family moved to Mumbai in 1944, and later Mohamedi attended St. Martin's School of the Arts, in London, from 1954 to 1957. After living briefly with her family in Bahrain, Mohamedi studied on a scholarship in Paris from 1961 to 1963, where she also worked at a printmaking atelier, and on her return to India, joined the Bhulabhai Desai Institute for the Arts in Mumbai. Here she met other artists working at the time, including V.S. Gaitonde, M.F. Husain and Tyeb Mehta. Sometime after she joined the Bhulabhai Desai Institute, her first solo exhibition was hosted at Gallery 59. It was in Mumbai where she met abstractionist Jeram Patel, who went on to become her friend and colleague, while Gaitonde served as her mentor.

She settled in Baroda in 1972, where she taught Fine Art at Maharaja Sayajirao University, and would continue teaching until her death in 1990. She also travelled abroad extensively, spending time in Kuwait, Bahrain, Japan, the United States of America, Turkey, and Iran over the course of her life. Travel provided an essential source of inspiration for Mohamedi, who photographed and kept diaries throughout her life. Not only was she influenced by the deserts, Islamic architecture, and Zen aesthetics that she was exposed to during her travels, but, as Susette Min notes, "Mohamedi was deeply and intensely aware, as indicated in her photographs and journal entries, of herself and her body moving in time." During the last decade of her life, Mohamedi's motor functions gradually deteriorated as she was challenged with a rare neurological disorder similar to Parkinson's disease, called Huntington's Chorea; she was able, however, to retain control of her drawing hand, and continued to create the precise, meticulous work she became known for, until her death in 1990 in Kihim, India at age at age 53.

Influences

In the West, Mohamedi is most often associated with Agnes Martin, with whom she was paired at the 2007 documenta in Kassel, Germany. Although Mohamedi's disciplined mark-making and frequent use of grids and lines does recall Martin's work, however, Mohamedi herself was not aware of the American artist and her paintings until late in her life.

It is known that Mohamedi knew and communicated with many of the leading artists in India in the 1960s and 1970s; V.S. Gaitonde, the great Indian abstract artist of the 20th century, as well as Tyeb Mehta, a renowned painter and part of the noted Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, became her mentors in the 1960s. Despite her interaction with such figures, as well as her immediate proximity to artists like M.F. Husain, Bhupen Khakhar, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, and Arpita Singh, Mohamedi created her own distinctive style; working at a time when the tendency was toward figurative or representational work, Mohamedi persisted in her pursuit of a personal vocabulary through which she saw the world.

In her diaries, Mohamedi makes reference to Kasimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, both of whom she admired and claimed as influences on her work. Indeed, Constructivism and Suprematism are often used in approaching her work, which seems to share not only a geometric language, but also follows a similar urge to distill a systematic formal order from nature. The lyricism of Mohamedi's work, the counterpoint to its precision and meticulousness, seems to have been influenced by the poetic and spiritual aspects of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky; in 1970, at what Kapur names as a critical point in her career, Mohamedi wrote in her diary, "Again I am reassured by Kandinsky – the need to take from an outer environment and bring it an inner necessity."

Comparisons to Mohamedi's contemporaries are also frequent among reviews of her work; she is often associated with the American minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s and likened to artists such as Carl Andre, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Richard Tuttle, and John Cage. Although not as closely related to her work formally, Eva Hesse has also provided an illuminating comparative example to Mohamedi, especially in the charisma and sensitivity she exhibited as a teacher and mentor.

Mohamedi's extensive travel also had great influence on the direction of her work. Not only was she able to gain exposure to Western artists and movements through her visits and study in Europe and in the United States, but she also became fascinated by Eastern traditions in her extensive travel in Asia. The distinctly emotive aspect of her work has been cited as the influence of the lyricism of Sufi, while her combination of geometry and Arabesque line is often traced to an exposure to Islamic design, especially the architecture of Iran, Turkey, and Rajasthan. Mohamedi's work also evidences the influence of Zen Buddhism, which she embraced spiritually, particularly its rhythmic counterpoint of positive and negative spaces. The time she spent in the desert regions of Bahrain and Kuwait have been cited as sources of some of the spare geometry of Mohamedi's work. It is also known that Mohamedi was interested in weaving – a number of her photographs feature looms and textile machinery – an interest that appears in the patterned texture and intersecting lines of her gridded work.

Work

Mohamedi's work defies categorisation; the result of a disciplined and sustained effort to craft an individual formal vocabulary, it remains without parallel, the product and artefact of Mohamedi's distinctive personality, process, and aesthetic values. In some of her early work, one can see attempts to capture the human form. She explored various mediums such as sketches, canvas based watercolour and oils to pencil and graphite. Her preferred medium of work was pencil and paper. She drew delicate but deliberate lines. She experimented with grid like formations and varying gradations at acute angles. What stood out in her works was her perception of light and shade. Although it is often difficult to temporally locate her work – she often left pieces untitled and undated – many critics have segmented her oeuvre into three general periods: an early period of sketches and semi-representational collage in the 1950s to mid-1960s, a "classic" period of increasingly non-representational forms, including her signature grid-based drawings, and a mature style in pen and ink. Although her work, especially the mature drawings of the 1970s and 1980s, is disciplined, even austere, it remains highly rhythmic – releasing the energy and movement of natural phenomena through line. The grid that so often provides a spatial environment for her drawings is less a limitation than a framework for her compositions, allowing, in the words of Deepak Talwar, the “poetry within structure” to emerge.

Mohamedi's work can be found in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India; and Queensland Art Gallery, Queensland, Australia.

Mohamedi has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET Breuer), New York (2016); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2015); Tate, Liverpool, UK (2014); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India (2013); and The Drawing Center, New York (2005).

Her work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

Photography

Beginning in the 1950s and early 1960s, Mohamedi began photographing her surrounding environment – not only during her frequent travels, but in the course of her daily life. Her photographs were more than documentary however; photos from the 1980s, for example, like her late work in pen and ink, are abstracted to the point of becoming non-representational. Her friend and art historian Geeta Kapur has placed Mohamedi's photographs between the artistic and the real, stating that they create "an allegory of (dis)placement between the subject and the object." Although her photographs were never exhibited during her lifetime, they were subject to an artistic process as rigorous as the one Mohamedi used in executing her drawings.

The photographs, although neither preparations for her drawings nor works incomplete in themselves, help to illuminate the principles that inform all of Mohamedi's work; as Gregory Galligan notes, "Mohamedi's is...a roaming, cursive, meandering consciousness, which lights effortlessly upon fragments in a landscape, the cityscape and Islamic architectural forms, such as the stepped cornice of an early mosque observed in extreme close-up...Spare, nearly weightless and almost entirely self-effacing, Mohamedi's aesthetic is ultimately about focusing consciousness back onto itself with the aid of an abstract foil." The first exhibition of Mohamedi's photowork outside of India was in 2003, at Talwar Gallery in New York. Her photography was based on themes such as desert landscapes, seascapes, weaving patterns, the architecture of Fatehpur Sikri, and modern structures.

Selected exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions

2023

CSMVS Museum, The Vastness, Again & Again, Mumbai, India

2020

Talwar Gallery, Pull with a Direction, New York, NY, US

2016

The MET Breuer, Nasreen Mohamedi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, US

2015

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Nasreen Mohamedi, Madrid, Spain

2014

Tate, Nasreen Mohamedi, Liverpool, UK

2013

Talwar Gallery, Becoming One, New York, NY, US

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Nasreen Mohamedi: A Retrospective, New Delhi, India

2010

Kunsthalle Basel, Nasreen Mohamedi, Basel, Switzerland

2009

Milton Keynes Gallery, Nasreen Mohamedi, Milton Keynes, UK

2008

Talwar Gallery, the grid, unplugged, New York, NY, US

2005

Drawing Center, Lines among Lines, New York, NY, US

2003

Talwar Gallery, Nasreen Mohamedi Photoworks, New York, NY, US

1991

Jehangir Art Gallery, Nasreen in Retrospect, Bombay, India

1961

Gallery 59, Nasreen Mohamedi, Bombay, India

Selected Exhibitions

2024

Turner Contemporary, Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950-1970, Margate, England

2023

Whitechapel Gallery, Action / Gesture / Paint: a global story of women and abstraction 1940-70, London, England

Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, France

Kunstalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

2021

Centre Pompidou, Elles font l’abstraction (Women in abstraction), Paris, France

Guggenheim Bilbao, Museum, Spain

2021

Talwar Gallery, as the wind blows, New York, NY, US

2017

Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (IAIA), Exhibition 1, New York, NY, US

2015

Whitechapel Gallery, Adventures of the Black Square, London, UK

2014

Fundação Casa França, artevida, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Drawing Room, Abstract Drawing, London, UK

Hauser & Wirth, Lines, Zurich, Switzerland

2013

Museum Abteiberg, Textiles: Open Letter, Mönchengladbach, Germany

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Echoes: Islamic Art and Contemporary Artists, Kansas City, MO

2012

Queensland Art Gallery, Lightness & Gravity, Brisbane, Australia

Parasol Unit Foundation, Lines of Thought, London, UK

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Crossings, New Delhi, India

2010

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), On Line, New York, NY, US

2009

Stuart Shave/Modern Art, Actuality of an Idea, London, UK

Talwar Gallery, Excerpts from Diary Pages, New York, NY, US

2007

Museum of Contemporary Art, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Los Angeles, CA, US

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, US

P.S. 1 / MoMA, New York, NY, US

Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada

The Museum of Modern Art, Lines, Grids, Stains, Words, New York, NY, US

Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal

Museum Wiesbaden, Germany

Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany

2006

Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Contemporary Photography from South Asia, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, US

Queensland Art Gallery, Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia

2003

Walker Art Center, The Last Picture Show, Minneapolis, MN, US

Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, US

Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Spain

Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland

2000

Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), Drawing Space, London, UK

1997

Queens Museum of Art, Out of India, New York, NY, US

1986

National Gallery of Modern Art, Indian Women Artists, New Delhi, India

1985

Centre National de Arts Plastiques, Artists Indiens en France, Paris, France

1975

Third Triennale, New Delhi, India


Publications

2005: Nasreen Mohamedi: Lines among Lines, New York: The Drawing Center.

2008: On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, New York: Museum of Modern Art.

2009: The grid, unplugged: Nasreen Mohamedi, New York: Talwar Gallery.

Legacy

In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

References

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