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Patel, Vibhuti
"Dividing Lines and the Art of the Exile"
The Wall Street Journal.
January 25 2013, pg. A21

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Friday, January 25, 2013  A21

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Dividing Lines and The Art of the Exile
BY VIBHUTI PATEL

"So exiles just wander around or do they look for a home?" Zarina Hashmi asked recently. 

Being an exile is something of a core identity for the Indian-born, New York-based artist. It began in 1959, 12 years after the traumatic partition of her native country, when her father, like many Indian Muslims, moved the family to the new declared nation of Pakistan.

"Home," she would recall, "is the center of my universe...my hiding place, a house with four walls, sometimes with four wheels."

At 22 years old, Zarina had not discovered the artist in herself. Her college degree was in science; she was enamored with architecture and geometry. After graduating, she married a diplomat, Saad Hashmi. But notions of home and memory, dislocation and exile, began to coalesce into a passion for making art.

"Those post-independence years in India were full of exciting dreams," she said. "I had no idea it would be the last time I'd live with my family."

More than 50 years later, Zarina, a renowned artist who goes by her first name, is the subject of her first career retrospective, "Zarina: Paper Like Skin", a collection of 45 works including woodblock prints, etching lithographs, sculptures in bronze and cast paper, and a series of influential pin drawings. The exhibit arrives at the Guggenheim on Friday for a three-month stay as part of a three-city tour. 

In her Chelsea studio recently, Zarina expressed surprise that the wider art community is finally coming around to her body of work. "What I've been creating is my personal anthology," she said. "I'm trying to understand how I got here. It has nothing to do with modern trends. It's a way of looking at things - architecture, spiritual values - but a different way of looking because it's from outside India."

Allegra Pesenti, the curator of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at Los Angeles' 
Hammer Museum, recently discovered Zarina's work for herself in Delhi, and subsequently assembled "Paper Like Skin." "I thought her very talented and was surprised I'd never heard of her," Ms. Presenti said. "Her work is different from other Indians', and yet it's connected to the country. I relate to its modernism. It combines Eastern and Western traditions."

But if the world has been late to recognize Zarina, who is now 75, she has certainly long recognized the world. After leaving India, she and Saad moved from country to country, interleaving each move with a Delhi residency. In Bangkok, in 1961, she carved her first woodblock, read about printmaking and dreamt of Paris. When Saad was posted there in the mid 1960s, a new world opened up. Zarina joined Irish printmaker Stanley Hayter's famed, "Atelier 17," spending three years studying under him. "I struggled, working step by step," she said. "Nothing's spontaneous, it never comes easy for me, but Hayter was supportive. He believed in me." 

A decade later, a year-long fellowship in Japan became another seminal experience, reinforcing her austere, minimalist style - alien to India's colorful, exaggerated artistry. ("Indian artist were making figured. I was drawing straight lines.") Later, she sculpted in wood and bronze, made prints and rubbings, and began to favor paper for its strength, delicacy and portability.

(l-r) UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Ramsey de Give for The Wall Street Journal
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