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Saffronart | Evening Sale
“I cannot seek form without.
It has to come from within.”
NASREEN MOHAMEDI
Nasreen Mohamedi
© Jyoti Bhatt
43
Nasreen Mohamedi painted only a few canvases in her
remarkable career, and by the 1970s had ceased working
with the easel altogether. Her aesthetics progressed to
a delicate and minimalist sensibility when she made a
complete shift to paper as her material of choice. Her
increasingly fragile health was reflected in the ephemeral
creations with which she is most identified today. The
present lot is important not just for the medium but also
for its language and experimentation with technique at
a time when Mohamedi was in close contact with V S
Gaitonde at the Bhulabhai Centre in Bombay, where they
shared a sensibility for abstraction.
Like Gaitonde, Mohamedi’s work, including this early
canvas, intrigues by invoking that which is absent.
“Nasreen’sworks in the early 1960s, especially her canvases,
retained the texture of being washed by the sea, cleansed
of all excess, with only a few apparitions of perceptible
forms. The opaqueness of the oil paint was amply diluted
to bring upon the translucent mistiness of watercolour
and delicately register a few faint traces of the physical
world.” (Roobina Karode,
Nasreen Mohamedi: Waiting Is
a Part of Intense Living
, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofia, and New York: The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2016, pp. 23 – 24)