Nasreen Mohamedi

Mortimer Chatterjee

Nasreen Mohamedi remains an enigma to much of the Indian and international art world: this despite being regarded by some as one of the most important artists of her generation and acknowledged as such in Documenta 2008 where she was accorded a full retrospective. There are a number of issues that have prevented her work gaining wider attention. The first is that she was active during a period where there was little local or international attention on Indian contemporary art. The second is that her work is quite unlike any of her peers of the period and as such her work refuses any attempt to slot into a broader art historical framework coming out of India at that time. Her work can be seen to fit into three phases. The first, beginning in the early 1960s after her study in London, saw Nasreen under the tutelage of the great Indian abstractionist Vasudeo Gaitonde.

At this point she was still experimenting with mediums, including collage, watercolour and oil. From the mid to late 1960s she became increasingly interested in Japanese watercolour techniques and her practice at this point turned almost exclusively to paperworks. The third and final phase of her career saw her turning towards photography; a medium that allowed her to extract from the world around her the abstract forms that had been informing her work over the previous decade. For the rest of her life the symbiotic relationship between the photographs and paperworks became the key to her practice and it is not possible to discuss one aspect without the other.