Nasreen Mohamedi

Nasreen Mohamedi was born in Karachi in 1937. She studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London from 1954 to 1957, then spent 1961 to 1963 in Paris on a scholarship, working in a printmaking atelier. Back in India she joined the Bhulabhai Desai Institute for the Arts in Bombay.

Her early work included oils, watercolours and pencil sketches. She left the colour behind. Her preferred medium became pencil and paper, and her mature work is in pen and ink: ruled lines, grids, diagonals and fine bands of shading, with nothing in them to recognise. They are rarely empty all the same. They read like architecture seen from very close, or light moving across a floor.

She also photographed all her life. The photographs and drawings belong together, two records of the same habit of looking.

In 1972 she settled in Baroda and taught fine art at Maharaja Sayajirao University until her death. In her last decade she had Huntington’s chorea, which gradually took control of her movements. She kept control of her drawing hand and kept drawing. She died at Kihim, on the coast near Bombay, in 1990.

The wider recognition came after her death. Documenta in Kassel hung her drawings beside Agnes Martin’s in 2007. The Drawing Center in New York gave her a solo show in 2005, and others followed at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in 2013, Tate Liverpool in 2014, the Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2015 and the Met Breuer in New York in 2016.