Painted Drawings
An exhibition hosted by Talwar Art Gallery contemplates late artist Nasreen Mohamedi’s multidisciplinary approach to art
Pull with a Direction, is an exhibition of work by Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990), through which one may examine the linearity of her work, where she uses her ‘brushes like a pen’. Talwar Gallery, New York, presents an exhibition that contemplates her gestural ink drawings, experimentation in photography, prints, paint on canvas and finally how she arrives at her ‘grids works’ that she is famed for executing.
The selection of works, some of which are being exhibited for the first time, date from the late 1950s until the 1970s, and they offer a rare glimpse of Mohamedi’s working process in its ‘incipient form’. The works register and reveal the paths of the artist’s early explorations, that are wide-ranging and emerge from landscapes, cityscapes and seascapes. It presents pages from her diary, where sometimes the words have been struck out and form the grid of lines for which she is famed.
Today she is considered one of the most essential modern artists from India, however at the time that she was painting and working alongside her Mumbai contemporaries, were mostly male and hence much more outgoing than Mohamedi. Whether it was her reclusive mentor V.S. Gaitonde, the eccentric and outgoing M.F. Husain, the quieter Tyeb Mehta or her special friend Jairam Patel, the art scene in Mumbai in 1960s and ‘70s was predominantly male. However, with time and travel women artists like Mohamedi, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh and art historian-critic Geeta Kapur made their presence felt among the Baroda Group.
Art historian, independent curator Gregory Galligan notes, “Mohamedi’s is…a roaming, cursive, consciousness, which lights effortlessly upon fragments in a landscape, the cityscape and Islamic architectural forms, such as the stepped cornice of an early mosque observed in extreme close-up…”
Mohamedi was born in pre-partition Karachi in 1937, and passed away in 1990 in Kihim which is situated in Alibaug, off Mumbai. She hailed from the elite Tyabji family of Suleymani Bohra Muslims, who were primarily businessmen. She was one of eight children. Her mother passed away when she was very young but her father who owned a photographic equipment shop in Bahrain, among other business ventures and has been cited as an important influence on the young Mohamedi. In 1944, Mohamedi’s family moved to Mumbai and later she attended St. Martin’s School of the Arts, in London, from 1954 to 1957. In 1972, She moved to and settled in Baroda (Vadodara) where she taught Fine Art at Maharaja Sayajirao University and also became part of the Baroda Group. She continued teaching there until she passed away in 1990.
The exhibition reinforces that nature remains an anchor, a sustaining point of inspiration for Mohamedi, even when discernible forms slowly disappeared from her works. The gallery is also showcasing Mohamedi’s prints that were created while in Paris in the early 1960s. With these she moves incrementally away from ‘mimetic representation’. It is said that she orchestrates a sense of depth through the ‘saturation and density’ of ink rather than the depiction of natural forms. Later drawings from the 1960s mark a further development, possibly registering the experience of the desert that Mohamedi witnessed in her travels to Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran and Turkey during this period.
The drawings’ sharp lines and softer washes of ink create a contrast that is echoed in the play between spindly desert bush and shadow in a vintage photograph from the same moment. Her friend and art historian Geeta Kapur placed Mohamedi’s photographs between the artistic and the real, stating that they create “an allegory of (dis)placement between the subject and the object.”
Her paintings work in a similar way, overlaying, but not obscuring, their origin in the natural world with a system of abstracted lines. Clearly ordered and without excess, they nevertheless retain an elegant potency that is Mohamedi’s untold legacy – encapsulating the dynamism and structure within nature. Mohamedi reveals an early investment in line as she carefully delineates the contours of a landscape while attempting to reconcile the perception of nature with the two-dimensionality of the plane of the paper – an inquiry that would sustain her interest in years that follow and profoundly permeate her oeuvre.
Mohamedi has been the subject of solo presentations at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET Breuer), New York (2016); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2015); Tate, Liverpool, UK (2014); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India (2013) and The Drawing Center, New York (2005). Pull with a Direction presents a crucial chapter in a career that has come to renewed critical and public attention in the past decade. A generous teacher, known for the asceticism and devotion of her style of living as of creating, Mohamedi has become a critical figure for the generations of artists who followed her.
https://talwargallery.com/nasreen-pullwithadirection
Till October 31 2020
Text by Georgina Maddox
Image Courtesy: Talwar Art Gallery New York
Find out more about the Artists and Gallery:
https://www.knma.in/artist/nasreen-mohamedi
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/nasreen-mohamedi
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/nasreen-mohamedi
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/m-f-husain
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/v-s-gaitonde
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/tyeb-mehta
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/jeram-patel
https://www.saffronart.com/artists/nilima-sheikh
