Nasreen Mohamedi, The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain

22 September 2015 - 11 January 2016

This exhibition is a collaboration between the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.

This is the first comprehensive showing of any Indian artist in Europe. With 207 works of Nasreen Mohamedi on display, the exhibition will bring to the international audience more than three decades of her working, compelling in its handling of drawings in ink and graphite, watercolors, collages, photographs and a few oil on canvas paintings. She hardly theorized or spoke about her work but documented her internal dialogue in a form of soliloquy, in tiny personal diaries and notebooks, some of which will be on display in this exhibition. The phases of her abstraction are made accessible by organizing the curatorial layout in a loose chronology to highlight her gradual shift from early works that retain references to the natural world to her linear drawings that use line and space in a geometric abstraction, and finally the last phase in 1980s marked by an economy of means with few delicately rendered lines that manifest an ascension from the ground.

In the history of Indian Modernism, Nasreen Mohamedi (b.1937) remains a distinct figure who broke away from the dominant figurative-narrative mainstream practice and became one of the outstanding artists who pioneered the trajectory of non-representational and non-objective art in India. In cultivating an interiorized vision, she chose a rather solitary path, seeking to reflect beyond the familiar and the known, arriving at a pristine form of abstraction quite apart from her contemporaries. Her journey was marked by the rigours of self-discipline and self-restraint.

Nasreen Mohamedi’s practice garnered serious attention within India and globally only in the last fifteen years or so and though admired in her lifetime, Nasreen remained enigmatic and elusive, quite the reflection of her work, a distilled oeuvre that does not lend itself to ordinary comprehension.