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The 1950s and early 1960s were crucial years in Nasreen
Mohamedi’s life. During this period, she travelled to
London, Turkey, Iran, Karachi, and Bahrain, where her
father was posted. She returned to India after studying
painting at the St. Martin’s School of Art in London,
and took part in her first exhibition with Bal Chhabda’s
Gallery 59 in Bombay in 1961. The present lot, painted
that same year, is possibly influenced by the desert
landscape of Bahrain, with its vast, scale‒less expanses
which are thought to have made a particular impact
on her art. The structure of the trees, stark and without
foliage, and the hot red burning glare of the desert sun
is captured with the abstract simplicity that was to
become more prominent in Mohamedi’s later work.
Another watercolour (see reference image) painted
during the same period displays a similar vocabulary of
stark tree trunks and an empty landscape that suggests
desert sand dunes.
She painted only a few canvases during her remarkable
career, and by the 1970s had ceased working with the
easel altogether. The present lot is therefore important
not just for the medium but also because it belongs to
a time when the artist began her foray into abstraction
at the Bhulabhai Institute in Bombay. The paintings from
this period are considered the “most agitated works in
her entire oeuvre,” according to critic Roobina Karode.
“Nasreen’s works 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... 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)
Mohamedi, who died in 1990 at the age of 53, has
in recent years, gained wide international acclaim.
A 2015‒2016 multi‒city exhibition of her work — a
collaboration between the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art,
Delhi, The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York —set her clearly among the leading non‒western
abstract modern artists. The present lot, signed and
dated by the elusive artist, offers a critical peek into her
artistic journey.
© Jyoti Bhatt
PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN, MUMBAI
16
NASREEN MOHAMEDI
(1937 ‒ 1990)
Untitled
Signed and dated 'Nasreen '61' (on the reverse)
1961
Oil on canvas
18 x 21.75 in (45.5 x 55.2 cm)
Rs 65,00,000 ‒ 85,00,000
$ 103,175 ‒ 134,925
PROVENANCE
Formerly in the Collection of Bal Chhabda
Nasreen Mohamedi,
Untitled
, early
1960s, watercolour on paper
Image courtesy of the Navjot and Sasha
Altaf collection
Another painting from the same
period displays a similar vocabulary
of stark tree trunks and a desert
landscape.
Inscription on the reverse of the painting