The 1960s were a very important decade for Nasreen Mohamedi. She lived in Paris for two years training at Monsieur Guillard’s atelier, frequenting the city’s many museums and spending time with fellow artists S H Raza and Akbar Padamsee. Mohamedi travelled extensively, visiting places like London, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Bahrain. She worked as a still photographer on the sets of M F Husain’s film Through the Eyes of a Painter. After... The 1960s were a very important decade for Nasreen Mohamedi. She lived in Paris for two years training at Monsieur Guillard’s atelier, frequenting the city’s many museums and spending time with fellow artists S H Raza and Akbar Padamsee. Mohamedi travelled extensively, visiting places like London, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Bahrain. She worked as a still photographer on the sets of M F Husain’s film Through the Eyes of a Painter. After a whirlwind romance which ended in a broken engagement, the artist’s devastation coloured her art. Mohamedi, whose practice was defined by the line, recorded her own observations on this new artistic direction in her diary, “Hardly able to speak / struggling, digging inner energies-force / strength, an emotion without a word … speak softly / my lines speak of troubled destinies, of death…”. Critic Roobina Karode notes the distress that undergirds works of this period, “Though her works from the 1960s seem to be within the lineage of lyrical abstraction, they are the most agitated works in her entire oeuvre. A certain messiness comes through, of nature withered, abandoned, bearing only traces of the “beatings” of life. Fatal signs of decay are accentuated: dry leaves with empty veins and spines, an isolated branch of a swayed palm left to perish… Colors begin to fade and disappear, and a monochromatic intensity takes over.” (Roobina Karode, “Waiting Is a Part of Intense Living”, Roobina Karode, Geeta Kapur, Deepak Ananth et al, Nasreen Mohamedi: Waiting is a Part of Intense Living, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2015, p. 27)

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