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拍品專文
I often wonder what my life would have been like had I never left my house of four walls in India [...] I do not feel at home anywhere, but the idea of home follows me wherever I go. In dreams and on sleepless nights, the fragrance of the garden, image of the sky, and sound of language returns. I go back to the roads I have crossed many times. They are my companions and my solace.
– Zarina
Since Zarina’s move to New York in 1976, one of the central concepts anchoring the artist’s practice has been the abstracted motif of the house in various forms, both printed and sculpted. She recalls, “I came to it when I needed to put my life in order. I suppose it functioned for me like writing an autobiography might function for a writer. It allowed me to situate myself after I had left the known path laid out for my life and struck out on my own. It was not that I wanted to go back, but I wanted to know who I was and what I had become” (Artist Statement, R. Samantrai, ‘Cosmopolitan Cartographies: Art in a Divided World’, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Vol. 4, No. 2, Bloomington, 2004, p. 177).
The concept of cartography also assumed an increased significance for Zarina at this time, considering both her youth in pre-partitioned India and her extensive travels and unique conception of nationality and origin. Along with her own move from Aligarh, Zarina tackles larger and more volatile examples of displacement such as the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent which caused the violent relocation of millions of people. In her work, she alludes not only a departure from material spaces, but also from the familiarity of something like a native language.
Influenced by the work of conceptual artists like Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Arp as well as the minimal sculptures of Richard Serra, in works like the present lot Zarina distills complex experiences and intellectual ideas to produce clean, uncomplicated images. Created using a pulp of Sanganer paper and mineral particles in a cast the artist crafted from urban detritus she found on the streets outside her studio in New York, the silvery surface of this large work, with its subtle niches, addresses the tenuous nature of home and identity, subjects now resolutely embedded in Zarina’s practice.
At first glance, the geometric pattern inscribed on the present lot appears to be a series of concentric squares. However, on closer examination, it becomes clear that these squares are in fact connected forming a continuous labyrinthine path. Along the edges of this path, a few pairs of small triangles may represent some of the many homes or dwellings the artist inhabited over the course of her itinerant life, and at the very center, is another house-like form evoking the dreams and memories of the artist’s original home. As with the rest of Zarina’s oeuvre, the simplicity of the present lot endows it with a meditative quality, inspiring introspection and reconnection with the past, and with places that were once familiar but now exist only as memories.
– Zarina
Since Zarina’s move to New York in 1976, one of the central concepts anchoring the artist’s practice has been the abstracted motif of the house in various forms, both printed and sculpted. She recalls, “I came to it when I needed to put my life in order. I suppose it functioned for me like writing an autobiography might function for a writer. It allowed me to situate myself after I had left the known path laid out for my life and struck out on my own. It was not that I wanted to go back, but I wanted to know who I was and what I had become” (Artist Statement, R. Samantrai, ‘Cosmopolitan Cartographies: Art in a Divided World’, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Vol. 4, No. 2, Bloomington, 2004, p. 177).
The concept of cartography also assumed an increased significance for Zarina at this time, considering both her youth in pre-partitioned India and her extensive travels and unique conception of nationality and origin. Along with her own move from Aligarh, Zarina tackles larger and more volatile examples of displacement such as the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent which caused the violent relocation of millions of people. In her work, she alludes not only a departure from material spaces, but also from the familiarity of something like a native language.
Influenced by the work of conceptual artists like Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein and Jean Arp as well as the minimal sculptures of Richard Serra, in works like the present lot Zarina distills complex experiences and intellectual ideas to produce clean, uncomplicated images. Created using a pulp of Sanganer paper and mineral particles in a cast the artist crafted from urban detritus she found on the streets outside her studio in New York, the silvery surface of this large work, with its subtle niches, addresses the tenuous nature of home and identity, subjects now resolutely embedded in Zarina’s practice.
At first glance, the geometric pattern inscribed on the present lot appears to be a series of concentric squares. However, on closer examination, it becomes clear that these squares are in fact connected forming a continuous labyrinthine path. Along the edges of this path, a few pairs of small triangles may represent some of the many homes or dwellings the artist inhabited over the course of her itinerant life, and at the very center, is another house-like form evoking the dreams and memories of the artist’s original home. As with the rest of Zarina’s oeuvre, the simplicity of the present lot endows it with a meditative quality, inspiring introspection and reconnection with the past, and with places that were once familiar but now exist only as memories.