Zarina Hashmi

(1937-2020)

Pool II (Burnt Umber) 56 x 56.5 x 6.5 (22 1/16 x 22 1/4 x 2 9/16)

Footnotes

Provenance
Property from a private collection, Mumbai.
Acquired from Gallery Espace.

Published
Gallery Espace, Zarina, Paper Houses, Solar Print Process Pvt. Ltd. 2006, p.3 and 30. (another from the edition illustrated)

A. Pesenti, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2012, p.74 (another from the edition illustrated)

Exhibited
Gallery Espace, Zarina, Paper Houses, New Delhi, 13th January - 3rd February, 2007. (another from the edition)

Note: Although the work is dated edition 3/3, Zarina confirmed to the vendor via email that this was her work, and was edition 1/3. 3/3 sold at Christies, and 2/3 was with her Gallery in New York.

'Pool I and II from 1980, relate closely to Fence (another series). These pools are slightly smaller, perhaps less abstract, but heavier squares which enclose inner recesses. While one of them has a thick sloped border leading into its interior space, the other Pool II, has actual steps around it which may represent the real stairs used for entering a pool if you imagine the piece lying flat. If you place it upright on a wall, however, as here, other architectural allusions intrude. The sections of a dome for instance, with graduating steps receding onto a flat surface, may come to mind.' (Robert Kimbril in Paper Houses, Solar Print Process Pvt. Ltd., 2006, p.7)

'Zarina's work in New York in the 1970s and 1980s shifted and came, as a surprise, to include this group of cast-paper sculptures. Up until about 1982 most of these were of outwardly geometric shapes, such as squares and rectangles into which other smaller geometric shapes had been formed and arranged in patterns over flat surfaces. Although the sculptures were framed within the simplest and most iconic geometry, they stuck the eye at the time with a kind of start: they were dramatic and arresting and were so original that they appeared at first to have had no background in Zarina's earlier work.

These sculptures did, however have a history and that history was one which traced and joined two lines of thought - about architecture and about paper - from the past. Zarina, recounts about her life, that she moved around the world and brushed up against the architecture of other places, and that as she later recast her memory of old structures and ruins, fragments of their architecture came into her imagination as a vocabulary of geometric forms.

We know from her story that in childhood Zarina wrote on slate tablets. Later exchanging one fascination for another, she came to see that just as a slate board could be used to inscribe letters so too could the more expressive surfaces of paper be used to register the marks and images of her prints.

In Bangkok in the 1960s Zarina made woodblock prints and stone rubbings on the plant - fiber papers of Thailand. In India in the late 1960s (after Paris and study with S.W. Hayter at Atelier 17) she made prints on handmade papers which came to her through the Khadi Gram Udyog Bhawan in New Delhi. The Khadi Gram was an artisan's collaborative founded by Gandhi to promote traditional crafts in India. Since its papers were made in a variety of manners and in several regional workshops, they offered artists the chance to test the expressive range of many different materials. Perhaps, they also forced Zarina to shape her print making ideas against some very stubborn surfaces.

Later in Japan, in 1974 Zarina studied woodblock printing and learned the technique of sizing paper. Finally, in New York, after all these chapters of study in Bangkok, Paris, India and Japan came together, she began to work out of a long history with paper, to create this astonishing group of sculptures.

To think back to the time when the sculptures first appeared, they seemed to have been crafted from a somewhat mysterious material - one which bespoke a weighty, even brooding mass. They did not have any of the lightness of paper. In looking into their surfaces, one read from them an older language, usually associated with stone, clay or bronze; they reflected several transformations of the paper from which they were crafted.

The question about why the sculptures came to look as they did were answered by the technique which Zarina devised for making them. (The technique, incidentally, was utterly of her own invention.) She began by pouring paper slurry as if it were molten metal into deep relief moulds. When the sculpture was to be a geometric one, its mold typically had smaller geometric patterns notched into it. The paper matrix could be pressed further by hand and then set to dry. Sometimes a piece, after it had been removed from its mold, was sized with mica or metal powder and further surfaced with gold-leaf, silver-leaf or glass shards. From a look back at Zarina's earlier paper works - mostly all prints and mostly conceived around geometric shapes - we can see new works as a re-configuring of the flat patterns of earlier prints into sculptural forms. What is interesting about the process if that it was accomplished altogether by hand without the use of tools or a printing press.' (Robert Kimbril in Paper Houses, Solar Print Process Pvt. Ltd., 2006, p.3-4)

For edition 3/3 from the same series sold at Christies see South Asian Modern & Contemporary Art, New York, 17th September 2015, lot 757.