Untitled

One of India’s foremost minimalists, Zarina Hashmi’s lifelong practice was inspired by sources that have minimalism, formalism and abstraction at their core—geometry, calligraphy, map-making, and Islamic architecture. Her language required little to convey a lot of what she had experienced—a peripatetic life as the wife of an Indian diplomat, loss of family due to Partition and of husband due to early death, and a sense of uprooting as her Aligarh-based family shifted to Pakistan in 1959. In this Untitled serigraph, bands in black and grey evoke fragility of memory and Hashmi’s own vulnerability born out of her personal experiences.