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拍品专文
With a remarkable career spanning more than five decades and as many countries, Zarina’s minimalist art evades much of the nomenclature intended to conveniently categorize and identify artists. Her work, which straddles the divide between the abstract and the representational, draws equally on architecture, geometry and poetry to raise questions concerning belonging, displacement, memory, loss and the ephemeral nature of ‘home’.
Zarina was born in the university town of Aligarh in Northern India in 1937, a decade before the partition of the Subcontinent, and India and Pakistan’s independence from colonial rule. Among the earliest influences on her oeuvre are the visits she made as a child to religious monuments in Delhi and Agra with her mother and medieval architectural sites with her father, who taught history at Aligarh Muslim University. Growing up surrounded by her father’s large collection of books, Zarina explored volumes on Western art and artists, took drawing lessons and then experimented with painting in her teens while studying mathematics and statistics in college. After her family moved from Aligarh to Karachi following the Partition, Zarina married Saad Hashmi, a career diplomat, in 1958, and left the Subcontinent to accompany him on postings in Thailand, France, Germany and Japan. It was on the first of these postings in Bangkok that Zarina was introduced to paper and printmaking, a medium that would become her forte and primary channel of expression for the rest of her career. Studying with a Thai artist, Zarina created her first print in 1961. Over the next fifty years, as she moved between cities like Delhi, Paris, Tokyo, Bonn, London and New York, Zarina continued working with printmaking and paper in various forms.
In New York, where she settled in 1977 after Saad’s sudden death, Zarina’s worldview and engagement with paper broadened dramatically as she found herself teaching a papermaking course at the Feminist Art Institute, and became involved with a radical community of women artists in the late 1970s and 1980s. Influenced by the work of conceptual artists like Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Arp as well as the minimal sculptures of Richard Serra, she created a series of sculptures that distilled her varied studies and experiences with paper and printmaking to produce clean, uncomplicated forms. “Zarina’s work in New York in the 1970s and 1980s shifted and came, as a surprise, to include this group of cast-paper sculptures [...] Although the sculptures were framed within the simplest and most iconic geometry, they struck the eye at that time with a kind of start: they were dramatic and arresting and were so original that they appeared at first to have no background in Zarina’s earlier work. The sculptures did, however, have a history and that history was one which traced and joined two lines of thought – about architecture and about paper – from the past” (R. Kimbril, ‘A Personal Language of Geometry and Architecture’, Zarina: Paper Houses, New Delhi, 2007, p. 3).
Though this sculptural practice represented a marked shift in Zarina’s body of work, it was not a radical one. In her sculptures, the artist’s obsession with formal purity and minimalism took three-dimensional form, retaining the lyrical essence of the lines that characterized her prints. Sculpting with paper pulp, however, allowed her the freedom to move beyond the confines of the page. As she explained, “When I make a print, I am dealing with the proportions of the page, the border, and the margins around it. When I began working with cast paper, it freed me from that invariable, rectangular page. With paper sculptures I found the freedom to explore other shapes. And although I have used colors in these sculptures, they are earth pigments: I use terra-rosa for brick red, graphite for slate-grey and powdered charcoal for black. Each sculpture is monochromatic – it retains the purity of form” (Artist statement, Zarina: Paper Houses, New Delhi, 2007, p. 10).
Describing her unique process of ‘sculpting’, Patwant Singh noted, “Watching Zarina in her studio in New York can be quite an experience. She makes the pulp which she needs from cotton rags. When the pulp is ready she mixes pigments with it. These are mostly earth pigments, or powdered graphite which is also a carbon. She shuns chemicals, man-made or synthetic colours. With the pulp and pigments mixed she then adds size to the mass, which means addition of glue; this makes it astringent enough so it doesn’t absorb moisture from the atmosphere. She then lets it stay for a few days so it becomes more pliable to her needs, then pours it into a mould, takes the water out with a sponge, and since all the water cannot be taken out, lets the rest dry in the mould. The process of drying can [take] two to three weeks. Once absolutely dry, the cast is taken out of the mould, the surface treated, and then rubbed with several materials until its surface has the patina she is looking for. What emerges is a work of art which is at the same time eloquent and mystical, timeless yet original” (P. Singh, ‘Zarina Hashmi, In Love with Paper’, Design, Bombay, January-March 1982, p. 48).
In Spiral, a monumental work from her sculptural oeuvre, Zarina draws on her memories of the home and garden in Aligarh where she spent her childhood with her family. Spiral was cast in 1982, the same year as Lotus, Rock and Seed, all of which evoke natural elements from the courtyard and garden at Aligarh. The largest of the artist’s paper pulp sculptures, this work recalls both architectural elements of the family home and specific childhood memories like that of the coiled snake that once slithered in from the garden on a rainy night, which resurfaces in her later portfolio of etchings House with Four Walls (1991).
Zarina “makes objects from paper pulp, wax, and bronze, and other metals, all of which have an elemental quality to them that appear to be serpentine spirals, segmented fruits, conical seeds, and lapelled buds. In many instances, she has given them evocative terms. Buds become amulets, seeds become tents, and a segmented fruit is called Shrine. There is a potential force within each form: Guardian powers, fertility, shelter, and the means to communicate with the spiritual world are suggested [...] Spiral is four feet in diameter. Caste from gritty paper pulp with line striations across the coils, it is tensely wound like a sleeping naga, serpent. In human scale, it is the counterpoint to Robert Smithsons Jetty” (M. Milford-Lutzker, ‘Zarina’. Women Artists of Color, A Bio-Critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas, Westport, 1999, p. 459)
At once austere and deeply nostalgic, the materiality of Spiral pulls together various strands of Zarina’s experiences and influences, from her childhood in Aligarh and her journeys around the world to her early practice in New York, describing the rich and interconnected character of her life and work. It is no surprise then, that Spiral reappears three decades later as one of the 100 miniature prints in The Ten Thousand Things, a diaristic portfolio Zarina created in 2009-10 to archive her life’s work.
Zarina was born in the university town of Aligarh in Northern India in 1937, a decade before the partition of the Subcontinent, and India and Pakistan’s independence from colonial rule. Among the earliest influences on her oeuvre are the visits she made as a child to religious monuments in Delhi and Agra with her mother and medieval architectural sites with her father, who taught history at Aligarh Muslim University. Growing up surrounded by her father’s large collection of books, Zarina explored volumes on Western art and artists, took drawing lessons and then experimented with painting in her teens while studying mathematics and statistics in college. After her family moved from Aligarh to Karachi following the Partition, Zarina married Saad Hashmi, a career diplomat, in 1958, and left the Subcontinent to accompany him on postings in Thailand, France, Germany and Japan. It was on the first of these postings in Bangkok that Zarina was introduced to paper and printmaking, a medium that would become her forte and primary channel of expression for the rest of her career. Studying with a Thai artist, Zarina created her first print in 1961. Over the next fifty years, as she moved between cities like Delhi, Paris, Tokyo, Bonn, London and New York, Zarina continued working with printmaking and paper in various forms.
In New York, where she settled in 1977 after Saad’s sudden death, Zarina’s worldview and engagement with paper broadened dramatically as she found herself teaching a papermaking course at the Feminist Art Institute, and became involved with a radical community of women artists in the late 1970s and 1980s. Influenced by the work of conceptual artists like Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Arp as well as the minimal sculptures of Richard Serra, she created a series of sculptures that distilled her varied studies and experiences with paper and printmaking to produce clean, uncomplicated forms. “Zarina’s work in New York in the 1970s and 1980s shifted and came, as a surprise, to include this group of cast-paper sculptures [...] Although the sculptures were framed within the simplest and most iconic geometry, they struck the eye at that time with a kind of start: they were dramatic and arresting and were so original that they appeared at first to have no background in Zarina’s earlier work. The sculptures did, however, have a history and that history was one which traced and joined two lines of thought – about architecture and about paper – from the past” (R. Kimbril, ‘A Personal Language of Geometry and Architecture’, Zarina: Paper Houses, New Delhi, 2007, p. 3).
Though this sculptural practice represented a marked shift in Zarina’s body of work, it was not a radical one. In her sculptures, the artist’s obsession with formal purity and minimalism took three-dimensional form, retaining the lyrical essence of the lines that characterized her prints. Sculpting with paper pulp, however, allowed her the freedom to move beyond the confines of the page. As she explained, “When I make a print, I am dealing with the proportions of the page, the border, and the margins around it. When I began working with cast paper, it freed me from that invariable, rectangular page. With paper sculptures I found the freedom to explore other shapes. And although I have used colors in these sculptures, they are earth pigments: I use terra-rosa for brick red, graphite for slate-grey and powdered charcoal for black. Each sculpture is monochromatic – it retains the purity of form” (Artist statement, Zarina: Paper Houses, New Delhi, 2007, p. 10).
Describing her unique process of ‘sculpting’, Patwant Singh noted, “Watching Zarina in her studio in New York can be quite an experience. She makes the pulp which she needs from cotton rags. When the pulp is ready she mixes pigments with it. These are mostly earth pigments, or powdered graphite which is also a carbon. She shuns chemicals, man-made or synthetic colours. With the pulp and pigments mixed she then adds size to the mass, which means addition of glue; this makes it astringent enough so it doesn’t absorb moisture from the atmosphere. She then lets it stay for a few days so it becomes more pliable to her needs, then pours it into a mould, takes the water out with a sponge, and since all the water cannot be taken out, lets the rest dry in the mould. The process of drying can [take] two to three weeks. Once absolutely dry, the cast is taken out of the mould, the surface treated, and then rubbed with several materials until its surface has the patina she is looking for. What emerges is a work of art which is at the same time eloquent and mystical, timeless yet original” (P. Singh, ‘Zarina Hashmi, In Love with Paper’, Design, Bombay, January-March 1982, p. 48).
In Spiral, a monumental work from her sculptural oeuvre, Zarina draws on her memories of the home and garden in Aligarh where she spent her childhood with her family. Spiral was cast in 1982, the same year as Lotus, Rock and Seed, all of which evoke natural elements from the courtyard and garden at Aligarh. The largest of the artist’s paper pulp sculptures, this work recalls both architectural elements of the family home and specific childhood memories like that of the coiled snake that once slithered in from the garden on a rainy night, which resurfaces in her later portfolio of etchings House with Four Walls (1991).
Zarina “makes objects from paper pulp, wax, and bronze, and other metals, all of which have an elemental quality to them that appear to be serpentine spirals, segmented fruits, conical seeds, and lapelled buds. In many instances, she has given them evocative terms. Buds become amulets, seeds become tents, and a segmented fruit is called Shrine. There is a potential force within each form: Guardian powers, fertility, shelter, and the means to communicate with the spiritual world are suggested [...] Spiral is four feet in diameter. Caste from gritty paper pulp with line striations across the coils, it is tensely wound like a sleeping naga, serpent. In human scale, it is the counterpoint to Robert Smithsons Jetty” (M. Milford-Lutzker, ‘Zarina’. Women Artists of Color, A Bio-Critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas, Westport, 1999, p. 459)
At once austere and deeply nostalgic, the materiality of Spiral pulls together various strands of Zarina’s experiences and influences, from her childhood in Aligarh and her journeys around the world to her early practice in New York, describing the rich and interconnected character of her life and work. It is no surprise then, that Spiral reappears three decades later as one of the 100 miniature prints in The Ten Thousand Things, a diaristic portfolio Zarina created in 2009-10 to archive her life’s work.