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Knight, Christopher
"Review: Zarina Hashmi imprints herself in paper"
Los Angeles Times
November 21, 2012

Titled "Dividing Line," Zarina has made a nominal map. Like something by Jasper Johns yet wholly her own, the print is at once a picture of a thing and the thing itself.

The artist, daughter of a university history professor, was born in Aligarh, India, a sizable city southeast of New Delhi in the region of Uttar Pradesh. She was 10 when the partition of India and Pakistan happened. Just over a decade later, her comfortable family moved to Pakistan, where their Muslim faith encountered less resistance. Soon she married a diplomat and moved away.

Zarina was since lived and worked in Thailand, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States — first Los Angeles, then New Yrk. No wonder ruminations on place are a central consideration of her prints: A sheet of paper functions as her portable but constant home

The Hammer show, which features 56 works, some composed of as many as three dozen elements, is her first L.A. solo exhibition since 1976. The engrossing survey begins in the late 1960s, after Zarina studied in Paris with the highly influential British printmaker Stanley William Hayter. (Artists as diverse as Kandinsky, Picasso, Pollock and Rothko worked with him.) From Hayter, she seems to have learned conceptual as well as technical knowledge of the medium.

The imagery in the show's first works derives from the material. Paper is typically made from wood pulp, and Zarina printed simple designs from inked fragments of wood. While remaining nonfigurative, the grainy compositions suggest fences, screens, walls and pens, or else the shapes seem to fold back in on themselves. She's corralling the space.

Allgera Pesenti, curator of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, astutely notes in the show's thorough catalog that Zarina's abstractions are built on traditions of European Constructivist art, while they also echo Robert Ryman's 1970s Minimalist conviction that the medium and the image are inseparable. It's as if paper's essence needs to emerge. In these works, the sheet of paper is in the process of being conceived as a unique and distinctive place.

The show's first riveting work is a group of 20 untitled is a group of 20 untitled "pin drawings," nominal prints made in 1977 by repeatedly pressing a sewing needle into sturdy sheets of BFK — another popular, highly refined white printing paper. Each time the needle pierced the paper, it pushed up a small mound of pulp around the tiny void. Dense rectangular fields of these tiny bumps recall microcosmic skin and macro-cosmic galaxies.

Argentine Italian artist Lucio Fontana has been puncturing canvases since the 1950s; Mexican artist Mathias Goeritz made perforated sheets of gilded metal around the same time as Zarina's pin drawings. But hers are less industrial, and they don't display obvious reference from Christian religious art. Her white surfaces are instead almost like Braille made for the eyes rather than the fingers. As low reliefs, the pin drawings assert that a work of art might at first blush appear to be flat and two-dimensional, but it's actually a tangible object in space.

Zarina's subsequent prints elaborate this theme in eloquent and multifarious ways. Among the most engaging is "1262 Knots" (1978), whose exquisite surface features an irregular grid made from knotted threads of white cotton. Think: Minimalist Persian rug.

In the 1980s, Zarina also began to make fully three-dimensional objects, sometimes cast from dense paper pulp and sometimes from die-cut metal or wood. Forms suggest flowers, seed pods, cocoons, mediation beads and stairs — objects implying transition. Color enters the mix with organic green, blue and rust joining the mostly black, white and earthy brown of the prints.