Nasreen Mohamedi, one of India’s most influential twentieth-century painters, personifies modernism’s global effect. Nasreen, who was born in Karachi in 1937, was India’s first female abstract artist, well known for her grid-like monochrome abstractions with rhythmic, linear markings in graphite and ink. Even thoughNasreen’s work was influenced by a wide range of aesthetic influences other than Western art, her style and approach are sometimes linked to the work of minimalists such as Agnes Martin. Nasreen, on the other hand, was unaware of the American artist and her paintings until much later in her life.
Nasreen’s work defies categorization; the result of a disciplined and sustained effort to develop an individual formal vocabulary remains without parallel, the product and artefact of Nasreen’s distinctive personality, process, and aesthetic values. In India she was in touch with many of the leading artists in 1960s and 1970s; she worked under the mentorship of 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. Despite her interactions with such figures, as well as her immediate proximity to artists like M.F. Husain, Bhupen Khakhar, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, and Arpita Singh,her work stood distinct. Working at a period when the trend was toward figurative or representational work, Nasreen persisted in her pursuit of a personal lexicon through which she interpreted the world. Her method of eschewing colour and figuration in favour of minimalist compositions that recall architectural designs or depictions of three-dimensional space set her apart from other painters of the period.
Nasreen was born into the affluent Suleymani Bohra family of Tyabji. Her father owned a photographic equipment shop in Bahrain, among other business ventures.Nasreen attended St. Martin’s School of the Arts, in London, from 1954 to 1957. After living briefly with her family in Bahrain, Nasreen studied on a scholarship in Paris from 1961 to 1963. on her return to India, she joined the Bhulabhai Institute for the Arts in Mumbai. It was there thatshe met leading artists of that time including V.S. Gaitonde, M.F. Husain and Tyeb Mehta. It was during her time in Sometime Bhulabhai Institute, that her first solo exhibition was hosted at Gallery 59. And during that time, she also met abstractionist Jeram Patel, who went on to become her friend and colleague.
In contemporary times, she is hailed as one of the key figures of South Asian modernism. However, she gained international acclamation only after her death while as her male contemporaries like M.F Hussain, S.H Raza, H. A Gade were more commercially successful and received a great deal of fame.Her work has been the subject of remarkable revitalisation in international critical circles and has received popular acclaim over the last decade. 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, Nasreen is considered one of the major figures of the art of the twentieth century.
Nasreen travelled extensively, spending time in Kuwait, Bahrain, Japan, the United States of America, Turkey, and Iran during her lifetime. Travel was an important source of inspiration for Nasreen, who photographed and kept diaries her entire life. Not only were the deserts, Islamic architecture, and Zen aesthetics she encountered throughout her travels influential, but as Susette Min adds, “Nasreen was deeply and intensely aware, as reflected in her images and journal entries, of herself and her body moving in time. She moved to Baroda in 1972 and taught Fine Art at Maharaja Sayajirao University until her death in 1990. Nasreen’s motor functions gradually deteriorated during the last decade of her life as she battled Huntington’s Chorea, a rare neurological disorder similar to Parkinson’s disease; she was able, however, to retain control of her drawing hand and continue to create the precise, meticulous work she became known for, until her death at the age of 53.
Nasreen is most connected with Agnes Martin in the West, with whom she was paired at the 2007 documenta in Kassel, Germany. Although Nasreen’s meticulous mark-making and frequent use of grids and lines echo Martin’s work, Nasreen mentions Kasimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky in her diaries, both of whom she liked and claimed as influences on her work.
