Zarina: Paper Like Skin

The Art Institute is thrilled to welcome the first retrospective of Indian-born American artist Zarina. Organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, this long-overdue survey traces Zarina’s career from 1961 to the present and features approximately 60 works from the artist’s studio, as well as from public and private collections.

Zarina Hashmi was born in Aligarh, India, in 1937 and has lived and worked in New York for the past 30 years. Her main medium is paper, which she employs in woodcuts, etchings, drawings, rubbings, and casts made from paper pulp. Although she is primarily a printmaker, she considers herself to be a sculptor as well, in part because the activity of carving blocks of wood is central to her practice. Zarina’s vocabulary is minimal yet rich in associations. Her abstract compositions are inextricably linked to her life and to the themes of dispossession and exile that have marked it. Even though her family is Muslim, they chose to stay in India following the partition of 1947, which caused the uprooting and deaths of millions of people. Eventually conditions in India made it impossible for them to stay there, but by the time her parents chose to immigrate to Pakistan in 1959, Zarina was married and living in Thailand. She was unable to return to her childhood home and was also not “at home” in Pakistan. She later lived in Germany, France, and Japan before settling in the United States. The concept of home—whether personal, geographical, national, spiritual, or familial—resonates throughout Zarina’s work. The line that defines her spaces is never anonymous; on the contrary, it is handcrafted and calligraphic. Although it appears in different guises throughout her oeuvre, her distinctive line is the unifying element of her compositions, like an umbilical cord that ties her to this world regardless of where she is.

Zarina, who chooses to be referred to simply by her first name, was a prominent figure in feminist circles of the New York art scene in the 1970s. She had a solo exhibition at Mills College in Oakland in 2001, which covered 10 years of her career. Her work has been featured in major exhibitions, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2007, and The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2009. She is represented in important public collections, including those of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She is represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York; Galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris; and Gallery Espace, New Delhi.