Important Notice

“Each line, texture (form) are born of effort, history and pain.”
- NASREEN MOHAMEDI

As an artist, Nasreen Mohamedi distinguished herself from her modernist peers with precise, minimalist work that rejected the representational and figurative. Embodying a vision to represent “the maximum out of the minimum”, her rigorous practice was marked by great discipline and restraint, even as she battled Huntington’s disease, a... “Each line, texture (form) are born of effort, history and pain.”
- NASREEN MOHAMEDI

As an artist, Nasreen Mohamedi distinguished herself from her modernist peers with precise, minimalist work that rejected the representational and figurative. Embodying a vision to represent “the maximum out of the minimum”, her rigorous practice was marked by great discipline and restraint, even as she battled Huntington’s disease, a debilitating neuro-muscular disorder that ultimately claimed her life. Though she rarely dated her works, it is possible to trace distinct preoccupations across Mohamedi’s oeuvre. In the 1960s, she experimented with oil and watercolour, organic forms, and loose brushstrokes. By 1972, when she moved to Baroda to teach at the Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU), she began exploring the potential of the line within a grid. She used a Rotring pen and draughtsman’s tools to inscribe precise horizontal and vertical lines of varying thicknesses and densities, producing works that were stark and highly formal and yet imbued with a sense of delicacy, movement, and balance.

“She charged the grid with dynamic movements through unexpected detour lines, skewed perspectives, illusions through patterns, and a dual sense of movement via the introduction of diagonals.” (Roobina Karode, “Waiting is a Part of Intense Living,” Nasreen Mohamedi: Waiting is a Part of Intense Living, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2016, p. 40) As seen in the present lot, the artist also introduced various geometric shapes, such as triangles and the Albertian cone, and interspersed her lines with spaces akin to shafts of light. “Proximate and spaced sets of parallel lines turn into shadow-planes. From translucent to pitch-black, these shapes of varying densities, suspended on a white surface, are sometimes sliced by light shafts charged with energy. However dense, these planar forms are not brushed in as solids but built up with a mass of lines…At times an entire girder is lifted off the ground and held in place. Nasreen counts it as an achievement-leaving the stability of the grid, handling so dynamic an element as the diagonal, and creating a perspectival distortion on the flat surface that reads like an acutely anamorphic horizon suspended in space.” (Geeta Kapur, “Again a Difficult Task Begins,” Nasreen Mohamedi: Waiting is a Part of Intense Living, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2016, p. 181)

It was through this personalised vocabulary of lines and geometric elements that Mohamedi recorded her perceptions of the world around her. Noting the significance of horizontality in her work, curator and artist Puja Vaish comments, “The horizon represents a limit (of vision)-a locale that is never reached but is endlessly shifting, presenting the mystery of unending space and abundance-as seen in the unobstructed landscapes of the sea and desert.” (Puja Vaish, “The Maximum Out of the Minimum,” Nasreen Mohamedi - the Vastness, Again & Again, Mumbai: Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, 2023, p. 47)

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