Sign In
 Go Back   Auction Catalogue 

lot 46

lot 46

Zarina Hashmi

Home is a Foreign Place

woodcuts on Kozo paper, mounted on Somerset paper
16 x 13 in. (40.5 x 33 cm.) each sheet
7.75 x 5.75 in. (19.5 x 14.3 cm.) each plate
executed in 1999

Winning Bid: $ 12,000

Estimate: US$ 5,000 - 7,000

Lot Closed

Lot Details

Signed, titled 'Afternoon' & 'Hot Breeze', dated and numbered 'Zarina '99' (lower edge) each
2 woodcuts with Urdu text printed in black
Edition 4 of 22

(Lot Note: From a set of 36 woodcut prints titled 'Home is a Foreign Place')

PROVENANCE
The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai
Private collection, Dubai

Zarina Hashmi has always engaged with the politics of space and its crossings. Mirroring her own extensive travels and the multiple meanings that the word ‘home’ has for her, Hashmi’s work challenges familiar locations like ‘country’, the ways in which they are bordered, delimited and traversed, and the feelings and memories that they evoke in us. Her minimalist prints use these locations to construct new geographies, imbuing them with fresh perspectives and new, universal meanings.

The current lot, which is from a set of 36 wood cut prints entitled "Home is a Foreign Place" (1999), is the artist's exploration of the universal nature of home and of an individual's sense of place in the world. She explores the metaphors of home and raises questions of meaning, stability, endurance, mobility and the ephemeral concept of the nature of home. The co-existence of calligraphy and geometric symbols in her work is her way of lending personal presence to an otherwise abstract image. Zarina inscribed texts in Urdu, giving clues to the viewers and allowing them to share her sensibility, reflecting how she views home which was once familiar but no longer.

Zarina Hashmi

(1937 - 2020)
Born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, in 1937, Zarina Hashmi received a Bachelor’s degree in Science with Honours from Aligarh Muslim University in 1958, before she turned to the study of print making in India and abroad. Between 1963 and 67 she studied printmaking with S.W. Hayter and Krishna Reddy at Atelier 17, Paris, and in 1974, studied woodblock printing at Toshi Yoshido’s studio in Tokyo on a Japan Foundation Fellowship. Her solo shows and retrospectives include ‘Zarina Paper Like Skin’ at the Chicago Art Institute, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2012-13; ‘Noor’ at Galerie Jaeger Boucher, Paris, in 2011; ‘Recent Works’ and ‘Kagaz Ke Ghar’ at Gallery Espace, New Delhi, in 2011 and 2007 respectively; ‘The Ten Thousand Things’ at Luhring Augustine, New York, in 2009; ‘Weaving Memory 1990-2006’ at Bodhi Art, Mumbai, in 2007; ‘Silent Soliloquy’ at Bodhi Art, Singapore, in 2006; ‘Counting 1977-2005’ Bose Pacia, New York in 2005; ‘Cities Countries and Borders’ at Chemould Gallery, Mumbai, and Chawkandi Gallery, Karachi, in 2004; and ‘House with Four Walls’ at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, in 1992. In addition, her work has been featured in several group shows and is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Hashmi has been awarded residencies at Art-Omi and at the Women’s Studio Workshop, both in New York, where she eventually settled. In 1985 and in 1990 Hashmi was awarded the New York Fine Art Fellowship in the printmaking category. In addition Hashmi has taught at Bennington College, Cornell University and the University of California in Santa Cruz. She passed away on the 25th of April 2020 in London at the age of 82.