exhibition sabatini building. floor 3 nasreen mohamedi ......oil on canvas was the most prevalent...

GOBIERNODE ESPAÑA

MINISTERIODE EDUCACIÓN, CULTURAY DEPORTE

Exhibition 23 September 2015 - 11 January 2016Sabatini Building. Floor 3

Nasreen MohamediWaiting Is a Part ofIntense Living

Exhibition organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.

Untitled, ca. 1970. Ink and graphite on paper, 46.9 x 46.9 cm.Collection of Dossal Family (Mariam Panjwani, Zeenat Sadikot y Laila Khalid)

Nasreen Mohamedi inglés web_Maquetación 1 20/09/15 12:26 Página 1

A leading pioneer of nonrepresentationaland nonobjective art in India and on thesubcontinent, Nasreen Mohamedi has in thelast two decades secured a distinct placewithin the history of Indian modernism aswell as garnered serious attention globally.Quite apart from her contemporaries, manyof whom remained invested in the then-dominant mainstream discourse thataddressed issues of identity and nationalismthrough the figural-narrative mode,Mohamedi worked against the grain toarrive at an abstract oeuvre of radicallypristine drawings and paintings. Herminimal aesthetic drew inspiration frommultiple sources, straddling Westernmodern movements and Islamic culture andsucceeding at a harmonious melding of therational and the poetic, the philosophicaland the mystical. Uncompromising, slow toreveal itself (as it was slow to evolve), her art

steps out of the formal domain to situateitself in the realm of transcendence. Thoughadmired in her lifetime, she remainedenigmatic and elusive, quite the reflection ofher work, a distilled oeuvre that does notlend itself to easy comprehension.

Born in 1937 in Karachi (then still part ofundivided India), Mohamedi was introducedto the idea of the mortal body at an early age,losing her mother when barely five years old.Mohamedi herself died prematurely at theage of fifty-three, having lived much of her lifewith the consciousness of impending death.Her body, afflicted by Huntington’sneuromuscular disease, was a constantreminder of this unsettling truth. Herpersonal diaries attest an ongoing battlebetween courage and despair, reflecting inher works a moving away from the angst-ridden early works to her later drawings that

Nasreen Mohamedi. Waiting Is a Part of Intense Living, the firstretrospective on the artist to be held in Spain, reviews more than threedecades of her artistic oeuvre, bringing together more than 200 worksin varied mediums, such as drawings in ink and graphite, collages,watercolors, photographs, and a few paintings in oil on canvas.Publicly, Mohamedi rarely theorized or spoke about her work, but the documents of her internal dialogue, tiny personal diaries andnotebooks, few of which are on display in the exhibition, form apowerful soliloquy. The phases of her abstraction are made accessibleby organizing her oeuvre in a loose chronology to highlight her gradualshift from works that retain references to the natural world, to thelinear drawings that use line and space in a geometric abstraction, to a final phase (encompassing roughly the last decade of her life) markedby an austere economy of means, by few delicately rendered lines thatmanifest an ascension from the ground.


seek an inner calm and resolve.In 1954, Mohamedi secured a place at St.Martin’s School of Art in London to studyfine arts. Her early sketches and drawingsreiterate her rejection of anthropomorphicrepresentation. The few stray attempts shemade to capture the human form offersparse detail, and reveal her disinterest inthe full-bodied corporeality of the figures.She experimented with diverse mediumsbut always with an impulse towardabstraction. In 1961, she was awarded aFrench scholarship and went to Paris tostudy graphics. While the works of PaulCézanne, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, andKazimir Malevich inspired her, she was alsoexposed in Paris to the personal ideogramsof Henri Michaux and the lyrical abstractionof Georges Mathieu. Having spent time inLondon and Paris, Bombay, Bahrain, andKuwait, she finally settled in Baroda, India,

where she taught at the Faculty of Fine Artsat M.S. University until her death in 1990.

During India’s postindependence decades,oil on canvas was the most prevalent artisticmedium used by Mohamedi’s peers.Mohamedi herself was never enamored ofthe medium, however, and painted only afew canvases before shunning it. Against thelure of a forgiving medium that allows forrevision and reworking, she preferred thetransparency of watercolor and ink,accepting the challenges of irreversibility.She explored the sensitivity of graphite andink in both her freehand drawing and hergeometric abstraction. As artists of hergeneration became more ambitious with thesize of their canvases, using large formats tounfold complex painted narratives,Mohamedi’s works grew smaller in size andmore economical in means. She embraced

Untitled, ca. 1972. Photograph b/w, vintage print. Silver gelatin print, 19.6 x 33.6 cm. Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi


the delicacy and fragility of paper,abolishing practically everything but line.

She spent a lot of time near the sea in thefamily house at Kihim, near Bombay(known today as Mumbai) and in the desertcity of Bahrain where the family businesseswere set up. Mohamedi was drawn to theimmensity of the sea, sand, and sky andequally to their anonymity and vastness.Her works from the 1960s are highlygestural, evoking certain precariousness—as of nature withered, abandoned, bearingonly traces of the “beatings” of life, anexpression she repeatedly emphasized inher diaries. Her collages of this period areserene and tender, carrying further heraversion to decoration, abjuring use of aninflated aesthetics.

In the absence of her own writings on herworks, her personal diaries and notebookshave become a highly relevant source, asthey provide glimpses into the innerworkings of her mind. They reveal herconnecting with ideas and feelings frommultiple traditions—Western literary andphilosophical, Sufi-Islamic, Hindu-Upanishadic, and Zen Buddhist—thathelped her comprehend her own angst. Sheread and was inspired by Federico GarcíaLorca, Rainer Maria Rilke, FriedrichNietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, SørenKierkegaard, George Steiner, AlbertCamus, and the poetry of Jalãl ad-Dın ar-Rumı and Mirza Ghalib.

By 1969–1970, Mohamedi’s illness hadbegun to disrupt her normal motorfunctions. She switched to an assistedworking etiquette using precision drawinginstruments with a mini-drafter that led, to a

pristine geometry in measured/ruled lines.The grids and geometry she leaned toward inthe 1970s were not without precedent. Shewas attentive to the classical Greeks, to thegolden ratio and the idea of eurhythmy.Closer to her time were the Russianconstructivists, Piet Mondrian, and KazimirMalevich. Closer to home were theAsian/Eastern mystical traditions that relyon geometry for a symbolic manifestation ofthe universe and its creative force. Thegeometric layouts or mandalas of templearchitecture consecrate the ground withgrids that represent cosmological diagrams.By employing the sacred science ofgeometry, in Islamic Architecture, the clearform, precise shapes and neat edges embodythe idea of archetypes, of order with whichthe greater concept of unity can be grasped.

In transiting from the notion of a free spaceto the regulated space of the ordered grid,Mohamedi evacuated all obvious referencesto nature. The accidental and referentialwere ordered through mathematics, thoughintuitively grasped into a rational structure.This inward turning shifted the emphasisfrom an outer world to an inner one, whereall traces of her subjectivity were erased andthe impulse of emotion distilled into a purethought and form. While for Mohamedi thiswas a new adventure, an even harder way towork with the rigor and restraint sheimposed on herself, what she arrived at wasnothing short of a miracle. She opened upthe grid, overcame its static orthogonality,and charged it with dynamic movementthrough the use of multiple horizon linesand diagonals, skewed perspectives, anddepth and created unparalleled rhythms andinterstitial spaces by a layering ofcrisscrossing of lines and the creation of


interstitial spaces. Mohamedi’s drawings ofthe 1970s and 80s are exceptional in that thedrawings neither look static, cold ormechanical despite being mathematicallyordered. One can hardly remain unaffectedby them even when one is unsure aboutwhat one is to see in the work.

Parallel to her drawings is her corpus ofphotographs, never exhibited in herlifetime. The early photographs emphasizeher interest in the framing of compositions.Linear elements, repetitive motifs such asutility poles and streetlights recedingalongside a path, lead the eye into remotedistance. Mohamedi captures the contrastbetween the curved and straight lines ofbuilt forms and fences or the way the playof light conveys a sense of depth to thecircular forms. Her semi-abstractphotographs of looms focus on threads aslines, their tautness at times echoing thehammer of a musical instrument.

Rarely are her photographs mimeticportraits of places, objects. Perhaps thememory of site was personally significant forMohamedi, but whether site served anyrevelatory aim in her photographs is unclear.For instance, the city/site/locale in many ofher photographs remains untraced, and oneis left to conjecture. In her photographs, as inher drawings, Mohamedi’s vision tends toremain austere. Her images refuse the lure ofeffusiveness, the temptation to fill the frame,paring away unnecessary elements to arriveat contemplation. Contrasts are accentuated,a mark perhaps of her time spent by the seaand in the desert, places where light alwayspresents itself in high contrasts and shadowsappear as intense apparitions. In herphotographs, the perceptible world/experience is extracted into an abstractconfiguration of lines, shapes, textures,patterns, and light.

As her health deteriorated, Mohamedi grewcalmer. She had made peace with the factthat her art seemingly detached from thesocial and political exigencies of her timemight not be accepted within themainstream discourse. In her position ofunbelonging, terms such as center orperipheral did not matter to her. She knewno external pressures—her compulsionswere all from within.

Mohamedi’s drawings of the last few yearsbecame extremely frugal, light and airy,aiming a release from the anguish of themundane to embrace a pure vision. Shepassed away on May 14, 1990, and liesburied in Kihim near the sea, her grave an unadorned mound of earth, marked bythe simplicity she longed for in both lifeand death.

Untitled, ca. 1975. Ink and graphite on paper, 47.4 x 47.4 cmKiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi


Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Sabatini BuildingSanta Isabel, 52Nouvel BuildingRonda de Atocha (on the corner with plaza del Emperador Carlos V)28012 Madrid

Tel: (34) 91 774 10 00

www.museoreinasofia.es

Opening hoursMonday to Saturday and public holidaysfrom 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Sundays from 10:00 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. opens the whole Museum,from 2:15 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. visit to Collection 1 and one temporary exhibition(check Website)

Closed on Tuesdays

Exhibition rooms in all venues will be cleared 15 minutes beforeclosing time.

Related activity

Encounter centred on Nasreen MohamediParticipants: Roobina Karodeand Geeta

September 23, 2015 7:00 h p.m.Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200

Education program developed with the sponsorship of Fundación Banco Santander

305

NIPO: 036-15-009-8 L. D. M-30088-2015


exhibition sabatini building. floor 3 nasreen mohamedi ......oil on canvas was the most prevalent...

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