Zarina Hashmi, the prolific Indian-origin artist passed away in London on April 25, after succumbing to a prolonged illness. While it is difficult to encapsulate the extent and impact of her works in just a few words, the 83-year-old artist's remarkable career and achievements speak for themselves. After earning a degree in mathematics, Zarina discovered and chose to nurture her artistic bent and gradually, through sheer determination, hard work and zeal, prominently established herself in the global art world.
Influences and Inspirations
Zarina was born in Aligarh, India in 1937, and got the opportunity to travel extensively post her marriage. Beginning with her hometown, several aspects of her house, early life, including events such as the partition of 1947, influenced her works. Every place she traveled to thereafter contributed significantly in shaping her career and moulding her as an artist in some way or the other. Communicating themes of home, borders, memory, displacement and more, her works, however abstract, could be looked at as tangible expressions of her experiences, feelings and personal life.
Traveling the World
She discovered printmaking in Bangkok, trained under painter and printmaker Stanley William Hayter in Atelier 17 in Paris and learned to create silkscreens while she was in Bonn. Her other travels included Tokyo, where she went to learn Japanese woodblock printing at Toshi Yoshida Studio in Tokyo after receiving a Japan Foundation Fellowship in 1974. Zarina moved to New York in 1976 and worked and lived in her studio there. In 1992 she began teaching printmaking at University of California, Santa Cruz and would travel between Santa Cruz, New York and Pakistan (her family shifted there after the partition). She moved back to New York in 1999 and was said to have been living with her family in London when she breathed her last on April 25.
Zarina's works included printmaking (Intaglio, Silkscreens, Lithography, woodblocks) and creating sculptures out of materials like bronze, aluminium, paper pulp, tin and more. She experimented diversely with paper and its forms, further exploring the potential of this material through puncturing, sewing, scratching and weaving. Her articulation of some ideas through maps and diagrams and her portrayal of geometric lines in certain works stemmed from her fascination with architecture.
Gallery Associations and Awards
Zarina's works have been exhibited in galleries across the globe, some of which include The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris and Gallery Espace, New Delhi. Hammer Museum in Los Angeles held a retrospective of her works titled, ‘Zarina: Paper like Skin' in 2012, which was then exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2013 and subsequently at the Art Institute of Chicago. She was also one of the artists to represent India when it had its first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and has been a recipient of quite a few awards and fellowships, including the President's Award for Printmaking (India, 1969).
Zarina's works emerged as a result of her experiences and strongly conveyed themes that one point or another had affected her life and they will continue to narrate her story, almost offering a window into the life she lived.
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