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The New York Times
nytimes.com

December 2, 2005

ART IN REVIEW; Zarina

By HOLLAND COTTER

Bose Pacia
508 West 26th Street, 11th floor, Chelsea
Through Dec. 23

Zarina Hashmi, who uses only her first name professionally, was a nomad long before a peripatetic way of life became art-world fashion. Now in her 60's, she was born a Muslim in Aligarh, India, and has spent long stretches of time in other parts of Asia and n Europe, Latin America and the United States. Even after making New York her base in the 1970's, she kept on the move, and her semi-abstract, minimalist art is largely about self-location in the face of constant change.

The two earliest works in the show, which covers some 30 years, are a small drawing and a thread piece. Together they suggest the breadth of Ms. Hashmi's formal influences: Indian textiles on the one hand; Western abstraction, from Mondrian to Eva Hesse, on the other.

A group of cast-bronze sculptures from the 80's and 90's, based on shapes of seedpods and flowers, establishes a recurrent theme. Their collective title, "Rani's Garden," refers to one of the artist's sisters and to the childhood home they shared. The same sister, who now lives in Pakistan, is the subject of a recent series of woodcuts that incorporates the Urdu texts of letters she wrote, but never sent, to Ms. Hashmi, about the aging and death of loved ones. Ms. Hashmi has superimposed the words onto geometric patterns: a street map of Aligarh, a floor plan of her family's former house.

In recent years Ms. Hashmi has turned her attention to Sufism, a meditative, ecumenical form of Islamic thought that encourages viewing the world in terms of spiritual metaphors, the approach of her art all along. The show ends with "Horizon," an image of a single line dividing a black field from a white field, suggesting infinity in two directions, accompanied by a quotation from the Koran: "And we shall show them our signs in the horizons and in their own souls." It is a fitting inscription for an immensely interior art. HOLLAND COTTER