Zarina (artist)

Born Zarina Rashid on 16 July 1937[1][3] in Aligarh, British India to Sheikh Abdur Rashid, faculty at Aligarh Muslim University, and Fahmida Begum, a homemaker, Zarina earned a degree in mathematics before studying a variety of printmaking methods in Thailand, in Paris apprenticing to Stanley William Hayter,[4] and with printmaker Tōshi Yoshida in Tokyo, Japan.[5] She lived and worked in New York City.[6]

During the 1980s, Zarina served as a board member of the New York Feminist Art Institute and an instructor of papermaking workshops at the affiliated Women's Center for Learning. While on the editorial board of the feminist art journal Heresies, she contributed to the "Third World Women" issue.[7]

Zarina died in London from complications of Alzheimer's disease on 25 April 2020.[1][8][9]

Zarina's art was informed by her identity as a Muslim-born Indian woman, as well as a lifetime spent traveling from place to place.[10] She used visual elements from Islamic religious decoration, especially the regular geometry commonly found in Islamic architecture. The abstract and spare geometric style of her early works has been compared to that of minimalists such as Sol LeWitt.[10]

Zarina's work explored the concept of home as a fluid, abstract space that transcends physicality or location. Her work often featured symbols that call to mind such ideas as movement, diaspora, exile. For example, woodblock print Paper Like Skin depicts a thin black line meandering upward across a white background, dividing the page from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. The line possesses a cartographic quality that, in its winding and angular division of the page, suggests a border between two places, or perhaps a topographical chart of a journey that is yet unfinished.[11]

Zarina was one of four artists/artist-groups to represent India in its first entry at the Venice Biennale in 2011.[12]

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles organized the first retrospective of her work in 2012.[13] Entitled Zarina: Paper Like Skin, the exhibition traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.[14]

During the 2017–18 academic year Zarina was the Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.[15] The residency culminated in a solo exhibition, Zarina: Dark Roads (6 October 2017 – 2 February 2018)[16] and a publication, Directions to My House.[17]

Examples of her work are in the permanent art collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Bibliothèque Nationale de France.[13][18]

• Zarina's Website
• images of Zarina's work at Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
• Gallery Espace, New Dehli, India
• Jeanne Jaeger Bucher, Paris, France