Recognized for her minimalist artwork worldwide, Zarina Hashmi was honored with a Google Doodle in the United States and other nations. Zarina Hashmi was an Indian American artist and printer who passed away in 2017. She had a significant impact on the art world and is recognized as one of the most significant minimalist painters.
Through this article, we will get to discover the life and works of one of the most decorated artists Zarina Hashmi.
Introducing Zarina Hashmi
Among all the prominent Indian painters, Zarina is without a doubt the one who, in the latter stages of her life, won the most recognition abroad thanks to important museum exhibitions at the Tate in London, the Guggenheim, the Met in New York, and the Chicago Art Institute.
Throughout their lives, Zarina achieved a level of discreet but unparalleled success and recognition in the international art world that neither M.F. Husain nor Francis Newton Souza, who had resided in London from the 1950s until moving to New York, could equal.
Early Life Zarina Hashmi
On July 16, 1937, Zarina Rashid was born in Aligarh, India. Her parents were Sheikh Abdur Rashid, a lecturer at Aligarh Muslim University, and Fahmida Begum, a housewife.
In 1958, Zarina graduated with a BS Honors in mathematics from Aligarh Muslim University. After that, she worked under Stanley William Hayter at the Atelier 17 workshop in Paris, studied a range of printing techniques in Thailand, and worked with printer Tōshi Yoshida in Tokyo, Japan. In New York City, she worked and resided.
Personal Life
After being married to a diplomat in the diplomatic service in her early twenties, Hashmi set out on a global adventure. She traveled and lived in Bangkok, Paris, and Japan, where she studied painting, modernism, and abstraction as art trends.
Zarina Hashmi eventually made her way to New York City in 1977, where she enthusiastically championed the causes of women and artists of color. She became a member of the feminist periodical Heresies Collective, which explored social justice, politics, and the arts.
Zarina Hashmi Life Works
Zarina Hashmi works mainly explored concepts of home, location, borders, and memory via her work in intaglio, woodblock, lithography, and silkscreen on handmade paper. Her fine graphic pictures were condensed into clean, basic delineations and frequently accompanied with Urdu inscriptions.
Hashmi also made a big impression at the New York Feminist Art Institute, where she gave talks and advocated for fair educational opportunities for female artists. She co-curated the seminal exhibition “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States” at A.I.R. Gallery in 1980, which was another example of her revolutionary directorial work. Diverse artists were given a platform by this show, especially female artists of color.
Zarina Hashmi Letters From Home
Zarina hashmi letters from home is one of her most loved and recognized art which is based on letters on the subject of family deaths and loss, written in Urdu by her sister Rani, which she had never sent out.
Hashmi’s remarkable woodcuts and intaglio prints, which combined semi-abstract representations of the homes and towns she had lived in, demonstrated her creative talent. Her sculptures contained fascinating geometric features and frequently included inscriptions in her native Urdu, inspired by Islamic art.
Artistry Life Of Zarina Hashmi
The idea of home as a fluid, transparent world that escapes materiality or location was addressed in Zarina’s art. Her artwork frequently used symbols that evoke concepts like migration, dispersion, and banishment. In her woodblock print Paper Like Skin, for instance, a thin black line that divides the page from the bottom right corner to the top left corner meanders upward over a white backdrop.
With its twisting and angular divide of the page, the line has a cartographic appearance that evokes a boundary between two locations or even a topographical map of an incomplete voyage. She made a woodcut print for her Delhi series based on an etching of Shajahanabad before the 1857 assault.
Zarina And Indian Touch
In 2007, Gallery Espace in Delhi, India, exhibited her work with the evocative title Kagaz ke Ghar, or Paper Houses. Zarina hashmi quotes used a line from Ghalib in that exhibition, in addition to the play on words that recalled the English phrase “a house of cards” and Guru Dutt’s classic Hindi/Urdu film Kagaz ke Phool: bedar-o-deewar sa ik ghar banaya chahiye / koi hamsaya na ho aur pasban koi na ho, which translates to “make me a house without doors or walls /no need for a companion, no sentry required.”
As an artist and a single, self-made Muslim woman, Zarina had achieved complete liberty in her wall-free, self-celebrated world of seclusion. Zarina is now identified as an Urdu artist, rejecting both Indian and Pakistani identities. Throughout the last ten years of her life, she often returned to the idea of the “self” traveling via memory in a number of her works.
Zarina Hashmi Death
After an extended illness of Alzheimer’s disease, Zarina Hashmi gently died away on April 25, 2020, in London, where she shared a home with her niece and nephew. Zarina Hashmi passed away away on April 25, 2020. A Google Doodle honoring Zarina’s 86th birthday was online named zarina hashmi google doodle games on July 16, 2023. Zarina Hashmi age was 82 when she died.
Concluding Up On A Warm Note!
Zarina had a remarkable life story and was an exceptional artist. She was quite nomadic, living all over the world throughout a large portion of her formative years. Many family members were then relocated to both sides of the partition when her family’s house was destroyed during the British-imposed 1947 Indian partition, which split the nation into the sovereign states of India and Pakistan.
Zarina Hashmi was an amazing person. She lived simply, almost minimally in a small Manhattan apartment, always concentrating on her painting; when a lightbulb went out, she was known to forget to replace it, sometimes depending instead on the gentler light of a candle.
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