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New perspectives

Different Strokes
Last Updated 09 July 2011, 12:22 IST
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Principally known for her contemplative abstract drawings, Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) formed her complex and intimate work out of seemingly easy straight black lines.

Meticulously thought out and intricately rendered, the drawings appearing as free-floating geometric forms and entwined planes/ grids are inspired by nature as well as man-made structures. The dynamic rhythm and inherent poetry of her work inexorably draws the viewer to a shared, ethereal experience.

Mohamedi never dated or titled her profoundly personal body of work. She chose to pursue the abstract and minimalist path, even when she belonged to an environment which was dominated by narrative and figurative art. Her work is often compared with that of American painter Agnes Martin (1912 – 2004), but Mohamedi was unaware of Martin’s work until late in her life.

Critics have marvelled at Mohamedi’s inspired visual language which showed incredible imagination and tremendous passion for precision. They have observed how her drawings float and settle like a macro-cosmic grid on the paper; how they raise the question of perspective in several different ways; and how they trace or weave regular patterns ‘as if mapping a pulse or internal flow onto external phenomena’.

Deepak Talwar of Talwar Gallery, who has been representing Mohamedi’s work for about a decade and is responsible for a topnotch publication on the artist, avers that “her clarity of pursuit and resolve was matched only by the taut tensile energy of resonating lines.”

In her evocative essay, Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved (1995), well-known critic and curator Geeta Kapur writes: “In Nasreen’s drawings, all is distance. There is nothing waiting at the end of the perspectival trajectory, no encounter at the vanishing point. Displaced through percussive shifts of the receding target, the vanishing point stretches both terrain and memory.”

Belated recognition
Mohamedi was barely known internationally during her lifetime. Several posthumous exhibitions and curated shows have helped place her in context and enhance her reputation over the last two decades.

“Mohamedi was a unique figure in the Indian art world, and the author of an oeuvre that is belatedly finding its place as a key component of the Modernist canon,” observes curator Grant Watson (Afterall: a journal of art, context and enquiry/ June 2009). “Her most important works, modestly sized drawings in pen and pencil on paper, would fit almost in their entirety into a single drawer — and indeed that is how many of them were found after her death, stored in her studio and apartment along with her diaries.”

Born in Karachi as the seventh child of Ashraf and Zynab Mohamedi, and brought up in Mumbai, Nasreen went on to obtain a Diploma in Design (1954-57) from St. Martin’s School of Art, London.

Her return to Mumbai in 1958 and joining Bhulabhai Institute on Warden Road — where many of the city’s leading artists had their studios — marked her entry into the local art scene.

She befriended the likes of Tyeb Mehta, M F Husain, Bal Chhabda, and more importantly, came in close contact with master abstractionist Vasudeo Gaitonde who exerted a strong influence on her. She also made good use of a French Government Scholarship by working at Monsieur Guillard’s private Atelier in Paris (1961-63).

For the next few years, she travelled frequently through the Arab world, including Bahrain, Turkey and Iran and came to appreciate and understand the nuances of Islamic architecture. In 1972, she joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at the M S University, Baroda where she continued teaching till 1988.

Mohamedi had her first exhibition in 1961 in Bombay and subsequently had her shows in Bahrain (1966/69), Delhi (1970/71), and Bombay (1974). She was featured at the Third Triennial in New Delhi in 1975, and ten years later in “Artists Indiens en France” in Paris.

Retrospective shows
In 1991 — a year after her death — a retrospective of Nasreen’s work was held at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay. In 1997, her works made a huge impression when shown at “Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora” exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art, New York.

Other shows which drew her work to international attention included “Drawing Space” in London (2000); “The Last Picture Show” at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2003) and “Lines among Lines” at The Drawing Center, New York (2005).

Her ‘discovery’ at Documenta XII (Kassel, 2007) — 17 years after death — was another major event. This was followed by a seminal exhibition of her important drawings from the 1970s, “the grid, unplugged” at Talwar Gallery in New York. Last year, her drawings were included at a show, “On Line”, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

“Mohamedi’s work is not identifiably Indian, or female,” writes Jonathan Griffin (Frieze magazine/ Nov-Dec 2009), “but neither is it possible to ignore her status as one of the very few female Indian artists building on a Modernist tradition that was initially forged almost exclusively by Western males.”

Mohamedi also came to be known for a small but significant set of black-and-white photographs which she never exhibited in her lifetime. In 2003, when her photographs were shown at Talwar Gallery in New York, art critic Deborah Garwood wrote: “Paradox is at the heart of her images. They describe a sublime and indeterminate realm on the periphery of iconic representation… As we befriend her vision, the world is both larger and smaller than we normally experience it.”

Nasreen was a purist in her work, according to Chhabda (who hosted her first solo show in his Gallery in ‘59), and by nature, a very sensitive, emotional and sentimental person. “She pro-created a new dimension in her attitude towards abstract painting, giving it a new vision and enriching the movement of modern art as well as becoming an inspiration to the new generation of artists in our country.”

Mohamedi made brief, poetic entries in her diary from the age of 22 until the end of her life.  “A spider can only make a web,” reads an entry dated 13 March 1970, “but it makes it to perfection.”


IMAGE COURTESY:
Nasreen’s work: Talwar Gallery
Photograph of Nasreen: Jyoti Bhatt/Ashraf Mohamedi Trust

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(Published 09 July 2011, 12:22 IST)

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