Zarina Hashmi - Biography | Artist | New York | Zarina Hashmi’s 86th birth anniversary

Biography

Born in Aligarh, India on 1937, Zarina Hashmi who goes by her first name is an Indian-born, American artist whose work spans from minimal drawing to printmaking and sculpture which more or less evokes and explores the idea of home, distances, trajectories influenced by her extensive travels. Zarina received a degree in Mathematics and is fascinated by architecture which reflects in her use of geometry and structural purity on her works. Having an identity of an Indian woman born as a Muslim, she uses visual elements from Islamic religious decorations, especially the regular geometry commonly found in Islamic architecture.

Zarina Hashmi

She has been one of the very few women amongst the Indian artists of her time to include M.F. Husain, V.S. Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta and Nasreen Mohamedi. Her artistic practice expanded after marriage and departure from Aligarh in 1958 during sojourns abroad when she lived in Bangkok, Paris, and Bonn with her husband, a diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. While living in Paris in the mid-1960s, Zarina studied with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 and was one of the many Indian artists living and working there at the time. Upon her return to India in 1968, Zarina moved to Jaguar and lived there, alone, for six years. She left Delhi for Tokyo in 1974 where she worked with Toshi Yoshido at his studio and immigrated to the United States the following year. Zarina built out her loft, a community of friends and was part of the city’s burgeoning feminist art movement. She supported herself by teaching at universities across the country then traveled back home to India, fought eviction from her apartment, had exhibitions in India, Pakistan, and New York, and continued visiting her family in Pakistan after they moved in 1959, the new country that they, but not she, would call home. Zarina’s relationship to her homeland and newly adopted country mirrored the fraught relationship both have had with their Muslim minorities.

Google Doodle celebrates artist Zarina Hashmi’s 86th birth anniversary.

By Tiasa Bhowal: Google paid tribute to Indian-American artist Zarina Hashmi on her 86th birth anniversary with a wonderful doodle. She is widely recognised as one of the most significant artists associated with the minimalist movement.

Today’s illustration has been done by New York-based guest artist Tara Anand. The artwork captures Hashmi’s use of minimalist abstract and geometric shapes to explore concepts of home, displacement, borders, and memory.

Hashmi was born on this day in 1937 in Aligarh. She and her four siblings lived an idyllic life until the partition of India in 1947. Zarina's family was forced to flee to Karachi in the newly formed Pakistan.

Hashmi was 21 when she married a young foreign service diplomat and began travelling the world. She spent time in Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she became immersed in printmaking and art movements like modernism and abstraction.

Artistry

Zarina's art was informed by her identity as a Muslim-born Indian woman, as well as a lifetime spent traveling from place to place. She used visual elements from Islamic religious decoration, especially the regular geometry commonly found in Islamic architecture. The abstract and spare geometric style of her early works has been compared to that of minimalists such as Sol LeWitt.

Zarina's work explored the concept of home as a fluid, abstract space that transcends physicality or location. Her work often featured symbols that call to mind such ideas as movement, diaspora, and exile. For example, her woodblock print Paper Like Skin depicts a thin black line meandering upward across a white background, dividing the page from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. The line possesses a cartographic quality that, in its winding and angular division of the page, suggests a border between two places, or perhaps a topographical chart of a journey that is yet unfinished.

Solo exhibitions

Year	Name of exhibition	Name of gallery	Place
2019–20	Zarina, A Life in Nine Lines	Kiran Nadar Museum of Art	New Delhi, India
	Zarina: Atlas of Her World	Pulitzer Arts Foundation	St. Louis, USA
2018	Zarina	Luhring Augustine	New York, USA
	Zarina: Weaving Darkness and Silence	Gallery Espace	New Delhi, India
2017–18	Zarina: Dark Roads	Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University	New York, USA
2016	Life Lines	Gallerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger	Paris, France
2014	Zarina: Descending Darkness	Luhring Augustine	New York, USA
	Zarina: Folding House	Gallery Espace	New Delhi, India
2012–13	Zarina: Paper like Skin	Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Centre	Los Angeles, USA
		Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum	New York, USA
		The Art Institute of Chicago	Chicago, USA
2011	Zarina Hashmi: Noor	Galerie Jaeger Bucher	Paris, France
	Zarina Hashmi: Recent Works, Gallery	Gallery Espace	New Delhi, India
	Zarina Hashmi: Anamnesis, 1970–1989	The Contemporary Art Gallery	Mumbai, India
2009	The Ten Thousand Things	Luhring Augustine	New York, USA
2007	Directions to My House	Shanghai Contemporary 07 Art Fair	Shanghai, China
	Zarina: Paper Houses	Gallery Espace	New Delhi, India
	Weaving Memory 1990–2006	Bodhi Art	Singapore
2006	Zarina: Silent Soliloquy	Bodhi Art	Singapore
2005	Zarina Counting, 1977-2005	Bose Pacia	New York, USA
2004	Cities, Countries and Borders, Prints by Zarina	Gallery Chemould	Mumbai, India
		Gallery Espace	New Delhi, India
		Chawkandi Gallery	Karachi, Pakistan
		Gallery Rohtas 2	Lahore, Pakistan
2003	Maps, Homes and Itineraries	Gallery Lux	San Francisco, USA
2002	Home is a Foreign Place	Korn Gallery, Drew University	Madison, New Jersey
2001	Zarina, Mapping a Life, 1991–2001	Mills College Art Museum	Oakland, USA
2000	Home is a Foreign Place, Admit One	Gallery Espace	New York, USA
		Chawkandi Gallery	Karachi, Pakistan
1994	Homes I Made	Faculty Gallery	University of California, Santa Cruz
1993		Chawkandi Gallery	Karachi, Pakistan
1992	House with Four Walls	Bronx Museum of the Arts	New York, USA
1990	Zarina: Recent Work; Bronze, Cast Paper, Etchings	Roberta English Gallery	San Francisco, USA
1985	Zarina Hashmi: Paper Works	Art Heritage	New Delhi, India
		Chitrakoot Gallery	Calcutta, India
		Gallery Cymrosa	Bombay, India
		Chawkandi Gallery	Karachi, Pakistan
1983		Satori Gallery	San Francisco, USA
1981	Zarina: Cast Paper Works	Hebert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University	Ithaca, New York, USA
	Zarina: Recent Cast Paper Works	Orion Editions	New York, USA
1977		Gallery Alana	Oslo, Norway
1976		India Ink Gallery	Los Angeles, USA
1974	Zarina: Screenprints, Tapestries	Triveni Kala Sangam	New Delhi, India
	Serigraphs by Zarina	India Ink Gallery	Los Angeles, USA
1973	Zarina: Woodprints	India Ink Gallery	Los Angeles, USA
1972		Chanakya Gallery	New Delhi, India
		Gallery F-15, Jeløya	Moss, Norway
1971		Chanakya Gallery	New Delhi, India
		Cultural Centre Ora	Athens, Greece
1970	Graphics by Zarina	Pundole Art Gallery	Bombay, India
1969		Gallery Chanakya	New Delhi, India
1968		Kunika-Chemould Art Centre	New Delhi, India