Viewing page 77 of 132

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Zarina, clockwise from front left:
Bud. 1987. clay: Amulet. 1987. wax: 
Shrine. 1987. wax: Silo. 1987. 
wax: G's Tent. 1987. wax.
All these works will ultimately be cast in bronze. The tallest, Shrine, is 26" high.
[[image, top center of the page]]

trees existing side by side in total harmony." In a proliferation of etchings and lithographs from 1985-86 this kind of double-jointedness is articulated.

Variously titled "Blossom" or "Blossom House," the image in these prints, in  each of its variations, is at once a flower, an ancient cliff dwelling, and a modular habitat. "My firsthand experience of Western art did not come until my late 20s when I lived in Paris. Contrary to what I knew or I was expected to admire, I was instinctively drawn to the primitive and the Gothic." Her description, furthermore, of "giant trees" tearing through "gigantic stone faces" in Angkor might in fact double as an impression of the buttresses and spires, the stone figures and gargoyles, of a High Gothic cathedral. With the vocabulary of sensations and aspirations, fear and hope, expressed by the Gothic, the West drew up what is probably its most widely legible emotive architecture. If Gothic architecture and artisanry are an exaltation of the accomplishments of the West, a peak on the horizon of "sophisticated" European society, it is also true that they most nearly resemble the devotional forms that have been ubiquitous in "primitive" cultures. And this instinct of Zarina's for elemental associations led her to the architectural shapes characteristic of her work, in which many roots may reside without contrivance or compromise. Her affinity for the primal and the Gothic link her work as well to certain strains of Surrealism, or rather to the work of certain artists circling through and around and past it—Jean Arp, for instance, and Max Ernst, and Hayter, and Lucio Fontana, and Yves Klein, and more recently Francesco Clemente, artists for whom the meanings of archetypal shapes, the divulgences of the personal mark, or the characters of materials have held greatest interest.

THE best of Zarina's earlier pieces, from the '60s and '70s, include elaborate and lyrical patterns of punctures in white paper, and works of threads drawn through paper, and woodcuts that reinvent and reveal the inherent metaphors of joining and sundering, of building versus growing, in the grain. That archetypal shelters are by now such abiding presences in Zarina's work may reflect the fact that she has lived and worked in many places, and that the concept of "home" is for her both an emotional reality, or necessity, and something of an intellectual and political abstraction. She is an Indian national, and must obtain a visa to visit her parents and sister, who have been in Pakistan since the Partition.

She was married to an Indian diplomat, with whom she initially traveled to the West. She studied printmaking first in Thailand, later in Paris, West Germany, and Japan. Self-consciousness as an artist—and as a citizen of the world and a feminist—took hold with a great sense of intellectual freedom and personal autonomy while she was living in Paris in the '60s, emerging from a state of considerable personal estrangement, and working at Hayter's Atelier 17. In the mid '70s she moved to New York, and since then her art and her working process have materialized into a formal language of assimilation, and a quarry for personal sustenance. "Now I feel at home wherever I am. The years of total isolation and panic from being away from everything I knew made me create my own homes, my spaces to hide."

"I WORK in small scale. I know the work has density of emotion and it will create its own space around it." Her art, in fact, represents the very essence of a minimalist esthetic. 

Physically literal and gesturally restrained, it is metaphorically monumental. Literally small, it is poetically vast. Almost any of her works in a room—a green seedlike object: an earth-toned lotus: a dark, fan-shaped relief: a great primeval, silvery, snaking spiral: a group of tiny, dun-colored, rudimentary clay-house sculptures- may seem contained, even reticent, when one first enters, but as one's eyes become adjusted to their level of intensity they let loose an insistent subliminal force that seems somehow to reassure us of our presence. Through this ineffable exchange our bodies are given an anchor in a place. It is to Richard Serra's work, which Zarina admires, that hers can most pointedly be compared. Where her work is small, and informed by the philosophies of assimilation, his is big and suggest confrontation, but both are similarly absorbed by the visceral and mutable nature of surfaces. 

They are positioned far apart but face to face within the complex diplomacies of people and objects in space. Between them one is reminded of the child's hand game in which scissors cut paper, rock breaks scissors, and paper wraps stone: complementary opposites, on common earth.

Lisa Liebmann contributes regularly to Artform.

All quotations of Zarina are from a letter from her to the author in December 1984, and from conversations between them.

76