Viewing page 101 of 117

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image]]
"Zarina: Paper Like Skin" installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2012. Photo: Brian Forrest.

despair and distance.) They mark tenuous anchor points that track the peripatetic range of the exile's experience, from the banal to the universal. Another poignant group of prints, Letters from Home (2004) is literally and physically based on a series of letters, again written in Urdu, that the artist's sister wrote to her, but did not send, about deaths in their family. Zarina overlays on these letters the charged imagery of her remembered Indian home, moving from blurring to almost complete blackening of the texts. Mapping and architecture (another of Zarina's interests) play a large part in her iconography; she again uses her technical fluency in printmaking to elevate this often dry visual language into a highly expressive personal statement. The politically charged These Cities Blotted into Wilderness (2003) is suite of nine prints that uses maps, carved in expressive, gestural lines, to depict the violent nature of the cities they describe. Another group of nine prints (and cover sheet,) Homes I Made/ A Life in Nine Lines (1997,) uses a softer, hazy line embedded in a scumbled field to imbue these simple plan views of Zarina's homes with a sense of longing and loss.

Rootlessness is a state endemic to many in our time: it is a poignant and moving experience to see this ever-increasing condition explored by an artist of this caliber.

In Zarina's own words: "Art is my mother tongue." This retrospective is a provocative and compelling body of work, deserving of a much broader audience.

'Zarina: Paper Like Skin" was organized by Allegra Pesenti, curator of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at The Hammer Museum. It was on view at the Hammer Museum from 29 September-30 December 2012. The show will travel to The Guggenheim Museum, New York (25 January-21 April 2013) and to the Art Institute of Chicago (27 June-22 September 2013). A catalogue accompanies the exhibition: Zarina: Paper Like Skin by Allegra Pesenti, with contributions by Aamin R. Mufti and Sandhini Poddar. 192 pages. Published by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Delmonico Books Prestel, Munich, London and New York, 2012.

M. Brian Tichenor and Raun Thorp are by turns architects, artists, designers and print collectors.
They live and work in Los Angeles.

Art in Print  January - February 2013   47