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LUHRING
AUGUSTINE
531 West 24th Street
New York NY 10011
tel 212 206 9100 fax 212 206 9055
www.luhringaugustine.com
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Wolff, Rachel
"Printmaker Zarine Hashmi Finally Gets Her Due at the Guggenheim"
Modern Painters.
January 2013

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Zarina Hashmi / Photo by Yukari Edamistu

"When I lived in Paris, I didn't close my eyes to what was happening around me, because you try to learn as much as you can," she continues. "Or when I lived in Japan — of course I learned whatever I could. You can't live in isolation. You have to engage with the community around you." There's also a bit of irony in fixing Zarina so firmly to her Indian roots: A longtime U.S. citizen, she needs a visa to travel there. She needs one to visit her family in Pakistan as well.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 prompted Zarina to tackle such geo-political divisions in her work. As she puts it, "I didn't want to shut out the outside world and make pretty pictures." She focused specifically on the borers she has seen, crossed, and slammed into throughout her life and travels, as well as the cities that have fallen beside them.

Dividing Line, 2001, is a spare though forceful rendering of the craggy cartographical stroke drawn in 1947 to delineate Pakistan from India. "She calls it a line that's traced on her heart," Pesenti says. "It's a line that has affected millions of people and homes, but it's also the line that prompted her to move away from her own country and take on this journey."

The 2003 portfolio "These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness (Adrienne Rich After Ghalib)" includes memorial-like portraits of cities like Srebrenica, Kabul, New Delhi, and Beirut, rendered in black and reduced to their basic roads and waterways. Zarina's deft, deliberate, and impassioned hand shines. There's an expressionistic roughness to the lies and edges of her printed cuts. They conjure anger at the circumstances that caused these communities harm and heartfelt empathy for those killed or displaced as a result.

This kind of guttural drive is some-thing of a hallmark in Zarina's work. "I love Jackson Pollock — people who can be free," she says. "But I'm very deliberate with my work. I'm not spontaneous, and it doesn't come easy for me. It's a struggle. I push it and I push it and I push it. Ideas come, but translating them is hard."

It has been a transformative few years for Zarina, who, despite having shown consistently since the 1970s, remained relatively little known. Her prints were included in the major touring exhibition "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" in 2007; she scored full representation and a major solo show with Chelsea's Luhring Augustive gallery in 2009; her work was included in the Indian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011; and Pesenti debuted her "Paper Like Skin" retrospective at the Hammer late last year.

As we sit in the living room of her loft (where an archive of boxes and files from her less in-demand days claim a reasonable chunk of space), an assistant is diligently cutting paper to size so it's ready when she wants to work. "I was working on a new piece last night," Zarina says, looking toward the small drafting table. It is situated near the window-lined kitchen for maximum light. "I need to work with my hands, to hold my material," she adds. "That keeps me partially sane." Reading does too — her bookshelf is stocked with everything from Barthes, Camus, and Calvino to treatises on Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam; and poetry and language remain constant sources for her prints. She's pleased with the renewed attention, but at 75, she can't help but feel that there are things she still needs to do. "I don't know if I have time to tie my beginning to me end — to complete the cycle," she says. "When time is running out, it becomes very precious."

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