Nasreen Mohamedi

Acquired from Archer Art Gallery, Ahmedabad

There is scattered foxing visible on the paper and some minor staining due to age, only visible upon very close inspection. There is a linear discolouration in the upper right hand quadrant that could potentially be minimised by a paper restorer. In good overall condition, as viewed.
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Nasreen Mohamedi is considered to be one of the most important modern artists from India. She has had great institutional acclaim  having been exhibited at the Tate Liverpool Documenta and most recently with a retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi that is traveling to the Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Mohamedi was born in Lahore and moved to Bombay as a child pre-partition. At the age of seventeen Mohamedi went to London to study at St. Martin's School of Art and then lived in Bahrain. Between 1961 and 1963, Mohamedi studied in Paris on a French government fellowship. In 1972, Mohamedi began teaching at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda where she was based for a number of years. 

Whilst at Sayajirao University, Mohamedi became friends with the Baroda narrative school of painters. However Mohamedi had a distinct use of line and mark-making that was unlike any of her contemporaries. "In sharp contrast Nasreen's aesthetic cleanly circumvents their substantive oeuvre. 'Maximum out of the minimum', Nasreen wrote in her diary, and spent her life working it out."(G. Kapur, When was Modernism, Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Tulika, New Delhi, 2000, p. 67).

Mohamedi's primary concern was with geometry and spatial abstraction within the natural world. Her early works were influenced by her mentor Vasudeo Gaitonde and were composed of wash and brushwork. By the 1970s Mohamedi began to pare down and remove all elements of figuration from her work. A fascinating group of photographs taken during this period illustrates the artist's increased interest in abstraction and natural phenomena. These photographs that were only exhibited after her death were studies that went on to inspire the delicate but precise geometric drawings of the late 1970s and 1980s, to which the artist is best known and the current lot belongs. 'Concerned with the ways in which the grid and the pattern emerge in nature, she attempted in her compositions not to order the world through modernist structure, but instead to seek the underlying rhythms of natural phenomena.' (S. Bean, Midnight to the Boom, Painting in India after Independence, Thames & Hudson Ltd., London and Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts, 2013, p. 160).