Nasreen Mohamedi

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937—1990) was an Indian artist best known for her line-based drawings, and is today considered one of the most essential modern artists from India.

Despite being relatively unknown outside of her native country during her lifetime, Mohamedi's work has been the subject of remarkable revitalisation in international critical circles and has received popular acclaim over the last decade.

Born in 1937 in Karachi, India, in what became western Pakistan some ten years after her birth, Mohamedi lived, even from her early years, a cosmopolitan life.

She was born into the elite Tyabji family, a Suleymani Bohra family She was one of eight children.

Her mother died when she was very young.

Her father owned a photographic equipment shop in Bahrain, among other business ventures.

Her family moved to Mumbai in 1944, and later Mohamedi attended St. Martin's School of the Arts, in London, from 1954 to 1957.

Although it is often difficult to temporally locate her work – she often left pieces untitled and undated – many critics have segmented her oeuvre into three general periods: an early period of sketches and semi-representational collage in the 1950s to mid-1960s, a "classic" period of increasingly non-representational forms, including her signature grid-based drawings, and a mature style in pen and ink.

It is known that Mohamedi knew and communicated with many of the leading artists in India in the 1960s and 1970s; V.S. Gaitonde, the great Indian abstract artist of the 20th century, as well as Tyeb Mehta, a renowned painter and part of the noted Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, became her mentors in the 1960s.

Despite her interaction with such figures, as well as her immediate proximity to artists like M.F. Husain, Bhupen Khakhar, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, and Arpita Singh, Mohamedi created her own distinctive style; working at a time when the tendency was toward figurative or representational work, Mohamedi persisted in her pursuit of a personal vocabulary through which she saw the world.

In her diaries, Mohamedi makes reference to Kasimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, both of whom she admired and claimed as influences on her work.

Indeed, Constructivism and Suprematism are often used in approaching her work, which seems to share not only a geometric language, but also follows a similar urge to distill a systematic formal order from nature.

Comparisons to Mohamedi's contemporaries are also frequent among reviews of her work; she is often associated with the American minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s and likened to artists such as Carl Andre, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Richard Tuttle, and John Cage.

Although not as closely related to her work formally, Eva Hesse has also provided an illuminating comparative example to Mohamedi, especially in the charisma and sensitivity she exhibited as a teacher and mentor.

Mohamedi's extensive travel also had great influence on the direction of her work.

Not only was she able to gain exposure to Western artists and movements through her visits and study in Europe and in the United States, but she also became fascinated by Eastern traditions in her extensive travel in Asia.

The distinctly emotive aspect of her work has been cited as the influence of the lyricism of Sufi, while her combination of geometry and Arabesque line is often traced to an exposure to Islamic design, especially the architecture of Iran, Turkey, and Rajasthan.

Mohamedi’s work also evidences the influence of Zen Buddhism, which she embraced spiritually, particularly its rhythmic counterpoint of positive and negative spaces.

The time she spent in the desert regions of Bahrain and Kuwait have been cited as sources of some of the spare geometry of Mohamedi's work.

It is also known that Mohamedi was interested in weaving – a number of her photographs feature looms and textile machinery – an interest that appears in the patterned texture and intersecting lines of her gridded work.

Mohamedi's work defies categorisation; the result of a disciplined and sustained effort to craft an individual formal vocabulary, it remains without parallel, the product and artefact of Mohamedi's distinctive personality, process, and aesthetic values.

In some of her early work, one can see attempts to capture the human form.

She explored various mediums such as sketches, canvas based watercolour and oils to pencil and graphite.

Her preferred medium of work was pencil and paper.

She drew delicate but deliberate lines.

She experimented with grid like formations and varying gradations at acute angles.

What stood out in her works was her perception of light and shade.

After living briefly with her family in Bahrain, Mohamedi studied on a scholarship in Paris from 1961 to 1963, where she also worked at a printmaking atelier, and on her return to India, joined the Bhulabhai Desai Institute for the Arts in Mumbai.

Here she met other artists working at the time, including V.S. Gaitonde, M.F. Husain and Tyeb Mehta.

Sometime after she joined the Bhulabhai Desai Institute, her first solo exhibition was hosted at Gallery 59.

It was in Mumbai where she met abstractionist Jeram Patel, who went on to become her friend and colleague, while Gaitonde served as her mentor.

The lyricism of Mohamedi’s work, the counterpoint to its precision and meticulousness, seems to have been influenced by the poetic and spiritual aspects of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky; in 1970, at what Kapur names as a critical point in her career, Mohamedi wrote in her diary, "Again I am reassured by Kandinsky – the need to take from an outer environment and bring it an inner necessity."

She settled in Baroda in 1972, where she taught Fine Art at Maharaja Sayajirao University, and would continue teaching until her death in 1990.

She also travelled abroad extensively, spending time in Kuwait, Bahrain, Japan, the United States of America, Turkey, and Iran over the course of her life.

Travel provided an essential source of inspiration for Mohamedi, who photographed and kept diaries throughout her life.

Not only was she influenced by the deserts, Islamic architecture, and Zen aesthetics that she was exposed to during her travels, but, as Susette Min notes, "Mohamedi was deeply and intensely aware, as indicated in her photographs and journal entries, of herself and her body moving in time."

During the last decade of her life, Mohamedi’s motor functions gradually deteriorated as she was challenged with a rare neurological disorder similar to Parkinson's disease, called Huntington's Chorea; she was able, however, to retain control of her drawing hand, and continued to create the precise, meticulous work she became known for, until her death in 1990 in Kihim, India at age at age 53.

Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, documenta in Kassel, Germany, and at Talwar Gallery, which organised the first solo exhibition of her work outside of India in 2003, Today, Mohamedi is considered one of the major figures of the art of the twentieth century.

In the West, Mohamedi is most often associated with Agnes Martin, with whom she was paired at the 2007 documenta in Kassel, Germany.

Although Mohamedi's disciplined mark-making and frequent use of grids and lines does recall Martin's work, however, Mohamedi herself was not aware of the American artist and her paintings until late in her life.