Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, ca. 1975
Ink and graphite on paper, Sikander and Hydari Collection
Nasreen Mohamedi exhibition inaugurates Met Breuer ‘Nasreen Mohamedi’ examines the career of an artist whose singular and sustained engagement with abstraction adds a rich layer to the history of South Asian art and to modernism on an international level. March 18 – June 5, 2016.]]>
Source: Metropolitan Museum
The retrospective spans the entire career of Mohamedi (1937–1990)—from her early works in the 1960s through her late works on paper in the 1980s—exploring the conceptual complexity and visual subtlety that made her work unique for its time, and demonstrating why she is considered one of the most significant artists of her generation. Together with the thematic exhibition “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible”, Nasreen Mohamedi inaugurates The Met Breuer, which expands upon The Met’s modern and contemporary art program.
This sweeping presentation highlights Mohamedi’s fascination with the possibilities of line to animate one’s perception of light and shade, an aesthetic that is also seen in the carefully focused and closely cropped photographs she took throughout her life. Having traveled extensively from Tokyo to New York, Mohamedi had a cosmopolitan outlook that drew her equally to the 16th-century Mughal buildings of Fatehpur Sikri and the 20th-century modernist architecture of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Her exposure to Western philosophy and literature as well as Sufi poetry also contributed to the multifaceted perspective she developed throughout her career and can be seen in her diaries, which include quotes by writers as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke and Albert Camus, as well as Rumi, Ghalib, and Mohammad Iqbal.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía with the collaboration of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.
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