ZARINA (B. 1937)
PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK
ZARINA (B. 1937)

The House at Aligarh

Details
ZARINA (B. 1937)
The House at Aligarh
numbered, signed and dated '5/16 Zarina - 90' and titled 'At night I go to the house at Aligarh'; 'Ami waits for the motia blossom'; 'Saeeda brings her children'; 'Aslam tells a story'; 'Rani asks me to sing a song'; 'Abba comes in to look at us' (on the reverse)
etchings on paper
8 5/8 x 7 7/8 in. (22 x 20 cm.) plate (each); 17 ¾ x 15 in. (45 x 38 cm.) sheet (each)
Executed in 1990; number five from an edition of sixteen; six prints on paper
6
Provenance
Bodhi Art, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Literature
Zarina: Mapping a Life, 1991-2001, exhibition catalogue, Oakland, 2001, p. 20 (one from another edition illustrated)
Zarina: Weaving Memory, 1990-2006, exhibition catalogue, Mumbai, 2007 (another edition illustrated, unpaginated)
Exhibited
Oakland, Mills College Art Museum, Zarina: Mapping a Life, 1991-2001, 2001 (another from the edition)
Mumbai, Bodhi Art, Zarina: Weaving Memory, 1990-2006, 2007 (another from the edition)

Lot Essay

“The notion of home remains immensely important to Zarina at the same time that she is acutely aware of its impermanence and mutability. She speaks, therefore, of a need to create homes for herself that are as much psychic dwellings as actual physical locations in the world. Even as her travels have taken her to lands spanning the globe, Zarina’s gaze has often turned back to the childhood home in India that she was compelled to leave so long ago. Although the artist does not speak of her formative experience in terms of trauma, it might be said that this separation engendered a yearning to revisit this site of rupture and to try to recover and reconstitute, through acts of memory, what had been lost. With a repertoire of simple, abstract shapes that serve as mnemonic devices to trigger connections to her past, Zarina imaginatively returns to the site from which her journeys began, her father’s house at Aligarh.” (M. Machida, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary, Durham, 2009, p. 216)

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