Important Notice

The 1950s and early 1960s were crucial years in Nasreen Mohamedi's life. During this period, she travelled to London, Turkey, Iran, Karachi, and Bahrain, where her father was posted. She returned to India after studying painting at the St. Martin's School of Art in London, and took part in her first exhibition with Bal Chhabda's Gallery 59 in Bombay in 1961. The present lot, painted that same year, is possibly influenced by the desert landscape... The 1950s and early 1960s were crucial years in Nasreen Mohamedi's life. During this period, she travelled to London, Turkey, Iran, Karachi, and Bahrain, where her father was posted. She returned to India after studying painting at the St. Martin's School of Art in London, and took part in her first exhibition with Bal Chhabda's Gallery 59 in Bombay in 1961. The present lot, painted that same year, is possibly influenced by the desert landscape of Bahrain, with its vast, scale-less expanses which are thought to have made a particular impact on her art. The structure of the trees, stark and without foliage, and the hot red burning glare of the desert sun is captured with the abstract simplicity that was to become more prominent in Mohamedi's later work. Another watercolour (see reference image) painted during the same period displays a similar vocabulary of stark tree trunks and an empty landscape that suggests desert sand dunes.

She painted only a few canvases during her remarkable career, and by the 1970s had ceased working with the easel altogether. The present lot is therefore important not just for the medium but also because it belongs to a time when the artist began her foray into abstraction at the Bhulabhai Institute in Bombay. The paintings from this period are considered the "most agitated works in her entire oeuvre," according to critic Roobina Karode. "Nasreen's works in the early 1960s, especially her canvases, retained the texture of being washed by the sea, cleansed of all excess, with only a few apparitions of perceptible forms. The opaqueness of the oil paint was amply diluted... and delicately register a few faint traces of the physical world." (Roobina Karode, Nasreen Mohamedi: Waiting Is a Part of Intense Living, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016, pp. 23-24) Mohamedi, who died in 1990 at the age of 53, has in recent years, gained wide international acclaim. A 2015-2016 multi-city exhibition of her work - a collaboration between the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York -set her clearly among the leading non-western abstract modern artists. The present lot, signed and dated by the elusive artist, offers a critical peek into her artistic journey.

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