Zarina

Zarina Rashid was born in Aligarh in 1937 and took an honours degree in mathematics at Aligarh Muslim University in 1958. The mathematics stayed in the work, which is built from grids, lines and measured space.

Her training in printmaking was itinerant. She studied in Thailand, at Atelier 17 in Paris as an apprentice to Stanley William Hayter, and with Tōshi Yoshida in Tokyo. She cut woodblocks, made etchings and screenprints, and cast paper. Later known as Zarina Hashmi, she worked under her first name alone.

She settled in New York, where she lived and worked for decades. Her subject was home, and what it is like to carry one around with you after it has gone.

Home Is a Foreign Place (1999) is a set of 36 woodcuts with letterpress. Each monochrome image is paired with a single Urdu word, such as home, threshold, distance or border, written in Nastaliq script by a calligrapher in Pakistan. The images are spare almost to the point of nothing; the words do the remembering.

In 2011 she was one of four artists and groups in India’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2012 the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles opened her first retrospective, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, which travelled to the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her prints are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Menil Collection, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. She died in London in April 2020, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.