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Espace • 2007

your week ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
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exhibition
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Geometry of Rasa

DELHI Be-dar-o-deewar sa ik ghar banana chaahiye / koi hamsaaya na ho (make me a home with no doors or walls/I would have no companion; nor the need of a sentry)—Mirza Ghalib.

New York-based Zarina Hashmi returns to Delhi after a gap of three years to show her paper-pulp sculptures titled Kaghaz Ke Ghar. "Paper Houses," she says, "Is a play of words both literally and metaphorically." Having been an itinerant artist for most of her life, Hasmi has for long been anchored to the ideas of home, identity and belonging in her art. Her childhood memories of Aligarh—she still remembers learning to write on a takhti (wooden board) with a kalan—well up like so many virgin springs in her superbly abstracted, austere and minimalist mindscape. Having studied in Japan, Hashmi practises a monochromatic, Zen-like aesthetic. Her penchant for basic geometric shapes is not so much reminiscent of European masters like Piet Mondrian or Kasimir Malevich as her been remarked by American critics, as perhaps of her own heritage of Islamic art of India and Pakistan.

Hashmi's square within square or a set of triangles forming a circle would appear to the Indian eye as abstractions of a stepwell (or a sacrificial altar) and a canvas tent rather than forms derived from dry (be-ras), Euclidean geometry. [[image]][[/image]] Here geometric abstractions are echoes of an emotion of melancholic memory. Occasionally, in her prints especially, she introduces a line, phrase or word in calligraphed nastalikh (Persian) script to lend that element of personal resonance.

A must-see show by one of India's truly great artists. On at Gallery Espace, from January 12 to February 2.
by S. Kalidas

MONOCHROME MILIMALISM: Works by Hashmi
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