Nasreen mohamedi saffronart
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Born in the British Indian Empire, Nasreen Mohamedi was raised in Lahore. From 1954 to 1957 she studied at the Central Saint Martin’s School of Art in London before receiving a scholarship to study in Paris from 1961 to 1963. Her first works, dating from the end of the 1950s through the 1960s, were colourful, monumental and inspired by nature. At this time, she began mixing oil with ink, playing with tonalities in a free and spontaneous movement that recalls Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. Her energetic works represent landscapes, at times depicting the deserts that she held dear. After finishing her studies, she moved to India, where she taught at the M. S. University of Baroda (today Vadodara) starting in 1971. This period marked a break in her practice, during which she abandoned any trace of figuration. She concentrated on space and line in her black and white ink and pencil compositions.
These works — the most well-known today, earning her a reputation as a great Indian Minimalist artist (according to the critic Geeta Kapur) — are still inhabited by the same
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Nasreen Mohamedi’s letter to artist, Nilima Sheikh, Image Courtesy: Nilima Sheikh and Asia Art Archive.
Nasreen Mohamedi’s hand-written letter to her close friend, artist Nilima Sheikh exudes a sense of both restraint and tenderness. With her formal handwriting, she composes what appears as a verse of concrete poetry – simultaneously referencing and exploring ideas of space – on a piece of graph paper. Providing a window into the late Modernist’s preoccupations with nature, abstraction, and the limits of perception, this letter, describing the seashore at Kihim, also inspires the title of her latest retrospective at Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF) – Nasreen Mohamedi: The Vastness, Again and Again.
Born in 1937 into a progressive Muslim family in Karachi, and raised in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), Mohamedi is recognised for her minimalist drawings in ink and graphite, calibrating rhythmic lines of different dimensions and weights. Highly controlled and rigorous in her commitment to precision, she laboured over these even through her final decade, while battling a de
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March 18–June 5, 2016
Exhibition Location: The Met Breuer, 2nd floor, Madison Avenue and 75th Street
Press Preview: Tuesday, March 1, 10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Celebrating one of the most important artists to emerge in post-Independence India, and marking the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, Nasreen Mohamedi examines the career of an artist whose singular and sustained engagement with abstraction adds a rich layer to the history of South Asian art and to modernism on an international level. The retrospective spans the entire career of Mohamedi (1937–1990)—from her early works in the 1960s through her late works on paper in the 1980s—exploring the conceptual complexity and visual subtlety that made her work unique for its time, and demonstrating why she is considered one of the most significant artists of her generation. Together with the thematic exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, Nasreen Mohamedi inaugurates The Met Breuer, which expands upon The Met’s modern and contemporary art program.
The exhibition is made pos
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