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Lot Essay
A drawing - each straight line ending with a different end.
Pick out drawings from the paper itself.
All the forces of nature are interlinked.
Pull with a direction.
Examine and reexamine each contour, each dot,
where rhythm meets in space and continuous changes occur.
Develop form through intuition from point to point.
Each line, texture (form), are born of effort, history + pain.
Lines strengthening from Form to Form.
- Nasreen Mohamedi, 1968-71
During a time when many of her contemporaries were engaged in the figurative tradition, Nasreen Mohamedi’s clean, minimalist approach, which first emerged in her oil paintings and later in her ink and graphite drawings and photographs, was a revelation. With an architect’s sensibility, she used geometry to develop a highly personalized vocabulary and record her perceptions of the world. “In the history of Indian Modernism, Nasreen Mohamedi is a distinct figure who broke away from the mainstream art practice of the early decades of post-Independent India, choosing the less explored trajectory of the non-representational. Without engaging in reconfiguring the world in images, Nasreen was drawn to “space” and her art was inspired by both man-made environments, especially architecture, geometry as well as the underlying structures in Nature. The optical, metaphysical and mystical overlapped in her quest for a non-objective, non-material world” (R. Karode, ‘A view to infinity NASREEN MOHAMEDI: A Retrospective', Kiran Nadar Museum of Art website, accessed July 2025).
A graduate of St. Martin’s School of Art in London, Mohamedi was well versed in Western modernist practices. “In India in the 1960s and 70s, Nasreen Mohamedi used a nonrepresentational line to create what [Agnes] Martin called ‘a plane of attention and awareness.’ In the West, her methodically linear work has often been aligned with Martin’s, but the underpinning artistic content is different in its relation to the real: where Martin’s hand-drawn, atemporal grids and horizontal lines, and her sensuous use of dilute primary colors, are avenues toward an ideal space, a space beyond the world, Mohamedi looks within the world, embracing the real and the social, both the peaceful environment of nature and its synthetic counterpart, the megalopolis. Rather than seeking refuge, or solitude, in a quiet place at a distance from the social world, Mohamedi often gravitated toward the harsh and tumultuous center. Yet her ‘lines among lines,’ in her phrase, share with Martin’s sense of fluency and of the fleeting – the nondual nature of all” (C. Butler and C. Zegher, onLine: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, exhibition catalogue, New York, p. 81).
Across her practice, Mohamedi's work was always “marked by rigours of self-discipline and self-restraint. Through acts of renunciation – of figures, objects, narration, decoration and excess, she arrived at an interiorized vision articulated in a sparse aesthetics and frugal means of art making, using pencil and ink pen to plot a phenomenological experience and breathe life into her lines, that often remained restless and always at the edge to embrace a view to infinity” (R. Karode, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art website, accessed July 2025).
Pick out drawings from the paper itself.
All the forces of nature are interlinked.
Pull with a direction.
Examine and reexamine each contour, each dot,
where rhythm meets in space and continuous changes occur.
Develop form through intuition from point to point.
Each line, texture (form), are born of effort, history + pain.
Lines strengthening from Form to Form.
- Nasreen Mohamedi, 1968-71
During a time when many of her contemporaries were engaged in the figurative tradition, Nasreen Mohamedi’s clean, minimalist approach, which first emerged in her oil paintings and later in her ink and graphite drawings and photographs, was a revelation. With an architect’s sensibility, she used geometry to develop a highly personalized vocabulary and record her perceptions of the world. “In the history of Indian Modernism, Nasreen Mohamedi is a distinct figure who broke away from the mainstream art practice of the early decades of post-Independent India, choosing the less explored trajectory of the non-representational. Without engaging in reconfiguring the world in images, Nasreen was drawn to “space” and her art was inspired by both man-made environments, especially architecture, geometry as well as the underlying structures in Nature. The optical, metaphysical and mystical overlapped in her quest for a non-objective, non-material world” (R. Karode, ‘A view to infinity NASREEN MOHAMEDI: A Retrospective', Kiran Nadar Museum of Art website, accessed July 2025).
A graduate of St. Martin’s School of Art in London, Mohamedi was well versed in Western modernist practices. “In India in the 1960s and 70s, Nasreen Mohamedi used a nonrepresentational line to create what [Agnes] Martin called ‘a plane of attention and awareness.’ In the West, her methodically linear work has often been aligned with Martin’s, but the underpinning artistic content is different in its relation to the real: where Martin’s hand-drawn, atemporal grids and horizontal lines, and her sensuous use of dilute primary colors, are avenues toward an ideal space, a space beyond the world, Mohamedi looks within the world, embracing the real and the social, both the peaceful environment of nature and its synthetic counterpart, the megalopolis. Rather than seeking refuge, or solitude, in a quiet place at a distance from the social world, Mohamedi often gravitated toward the harsh and tumultuous center. Yet her ‘lines among lines,’ in her phrase, share with Martin’s sense of fluency and of the fleeting – the nondual nature of all” (C. Butler and C. Zegher, onLine: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, exhibition catalogue, New York, p. 81).
Across her practice, Mohamedi's work was always “marked by rigours of self-discipline and self-restraint. Through acts of renunciation – of figures, objects, narration, decoration and excess, she arrived at an interiorized vision articulated in a sparse aesthetics and frugal means of art making, using pencil and ink pen to plot a phenomenological experience and breathe life into her lines, that often remained restless and always at the edge to embrace a view to infinity” (R. Karode, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art website, accessed July 2025).