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拍品专文
On the recommendation of Krishna Reddy, Zarina was offered a teaching position in the art department at the University of California Santa Cruz in 1992. She spent the next seven years running printmaking workshops for students there, and travelling to New York and Pakistan to visit family in between.
In this portfolio, executed in 1996 “Zarina pictures her felt encounter with the environment surrounding her in Santa Cruz, California. She has overlaid the last print with a verse by the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz: ‘There is a place in my heart which cannot get rid of its loneliness.’ Zarina often finds that words come first and conjures up the imagery which in this instance evokes the infinite space meeting the land’s edge. In the four etchings [...] the fields are divided into two parts and where they meet, one senses the horizon. Zarina is fully in command of the etching techniques that make the rich color from powdered indigo pigment feel almost like velvet black. That and the effect of the touch left by the drawing tool reminds me of Mark Rothko’s very late dark paintings. In both his paintings and her prints pure abstraction is the vehicle for profound content” (J. Brodsky, ‘The Imprint of a Transnational Life’ Zarina, Weaving Memory, 1990-2006, Mumbai, 2007, not paginated).
In these four etchings, individually titled Santa Cruz, Monterey Bay, Night Sea and Dark Sea, the artist “uses the rigid formality of light and dark blocks to conjure up the mysterious space of creativity out of which poetry appears, while alluding to the works of artists like Brice Marden and Richard Serra. At her best, Zarina made the invisible filaments of memory tangible and alive, evoking distant spaces and current feelings; a life left behind and a life well lived. Her work could be stunningly beautiful and haptic as easily as it could be cerebral and abstract—but it was always meaningful and carefully considered, as she was herself” (G.D. Lowry, ‘Remembering Zarina, 1937-2020’, Museum of Modern Art website, 30 April 2020, accessed December 2024).
Speaking about this work, Zarina recalls, “In Santa Cruz, there was a beautiful sunset on Monterey Bay, and the lights going up – twilight they call it – it was so beautiful. Then I thought of Faiz’s “kai baar us ka daaman bhar diya husn-e-do aalam se” and then there is a misra, “magar dil hai ki us ki khana virani nahin jaati,” [A misra is a line in Urdu poetry. This poetry by Faiz Ahmad Faiz loses much of its meaning in translation but a rough translation is ‘How often it is filled with the beauty of both worlds, and yet the emptiness of my heart remains.’] which is in the Santa Cruz portfolio. I wanted to do ten but time was running out and so I just did this one, Santa Cruz (1996)” (Artist statement, S. Shirazi, ‘Feminism for Me Was About Equal Pay for Equal Work—Not About Burning Bras: Interview with Zarina’, Post, Notes on Art in a Global Context, Museum of Modern Art website, 8 March 2018, accessed December 2024).
In this portfolio, executed in 1996 “Zarina pictures her felt encounter with the environment surrounding her in Santa Cruz, California. She has overlaid the last print with a verse by the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz: ‘There is a place in my heart which cannot get rid of its loneliness.’ Zarina often finds that words come first and conjures up the imagery which in this instance evokes the infinite space meeting the land’s edge. In the four etchings [...] the fields are divided into two parts and where they meet, one senses the horizon. Zarina is fully in command of the etching techniques that make the rich color from powdered indigo pigment feel almost like velvet black. That and the effect of the touch left by the drawing tool reminds me of Mark Rothko’s very late dark paintings. In both his paintings and her prints pure abstraction is the vehicle for profound content” (J. Brodsky, ‘The Imprint of a Transnational Life’ Zarina, Weaving Memory, 1990-2006, Mumbai, 2007, not paginated).
In these four etchings, individually titled Santa Cruz, Monterey Bay, Night Sea and Dark Sea, the artist “uses the rigid formality of light and dark blocks to conjure up the mysterious space of creativity out of which poetry appears, while alluding to the works of artists like Brice Marden and Richard Serra. At her best, Zarina made the invisible filaments of memory tangible and alive, evoking distant spaces and current feelings; a life left behind and a life well lived. Her work could be stunningly beautiful and haptic as easily as it could be cerebral and abstract—but it was always meaningful and carefully considered, as she was herself” (G.D. Lowry, ‘Remembering Zarina, 1937-2020’, Museum of Modern Art website, 30 April 2020, accessed December 2024).
Speaking about this work, Zarina recalls, “In Santa Cruz, there was a beautiful sunset on Monterey Bay, and the lights going up – twilight they call it – it was so beautiful. Then I thought of Faiz’s “kai baar us ka daaman bhar diya husn-e-do aalam se” and then there is a misra, “magar dil hai ki us ki khana virani nahin jaati,” [A misra is a line in Urdu poetry. This poetry by Faiz Ahmad Faiz loses much of its meaning in translation but a rough translation is ‘How often it is filled with the beauty of both worlds, and yet the emptiness of my heart remains.’] which is in the Santa Cruz portfolio. I wanted to do ten but time was running out and so I just did this one, Santa Cruz (1996)” (Artist statement, S. Shirazi, ‘Feminism for Me Was About Equal Pay for Equal Work—Not About Burning Bras: Interview with Zarina’, Post, Notes on Art in a Global Context, Museum of Modern Art website, 8 March 2018, accessed December 2024).