A Personal Language of Geometry
& Architecture

Noted art historian Robert Kimbril in this essay contributed to the catalogue goes through the works of the senior artist Zarina Hashmi and elucidates the formal and theoretical values of her works.

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 struck the eye at that 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.

The 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 questions 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  molds. 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 all conceived around geometric shapes—we can see the new works as a re-configuring of the flat patterns of earlier prints into sculptural forms. What is interesting about the process is that it was accomplished altogether by hand without the use of tools or a printing press.

Geometry

Four of the sculptures in this group are formed as simple squares and  meditate, I think, as does Malevich’s famous square on the purity of that shape. One of these, Fence, an indefinite  minimal plain, is rimmed by a border of parallel stacked lines. In outward appearance, it is only an enclosure or perhaps a tablet. Its inner surface is quiet; but its presence does not for a moment leave the mind quiet: it strikes the eye with a welter of allusions and questions. If you ask where such an old and formal “thing” could have been before, its almost hieratic demeanor might answer that it could once have had a life in a place of learning or a scribe’s workshop.
Since the piece is so formally abstract (a square after all) it resists any  specific reading of its past life. It suggests and simultaneously obscures interpretation. It prompts all manner of both historical and architectural musings to hover unanswered over its cool surface.

Two other works, Pool I and II, from 1980, relate closely to Fence. 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, but only, perhaps, for a moment. The architecture here is not specific and whether Pool II is a fragment of stonework or a unit of imagination is not made clear.

Pool I, according to Zarina, is a simple enclosure. But her ironic minimal statement does not, except in a reductive and mathematical sort of way, say anything more about the piece than does calling it a square. To get into the language through which it gives up its meaning we have to look into the surface light playing off its color. This pool casts strange shadows and its color moves halfway from one tone to another; it can appear grey, copper, or ochre by turns. Its presence is slightly otherworldly and darker than that of the other square—as though it had been cast in the half-light of a Gothic place.

The shifting appearances of the pools reflect the subtle properties of their paper matrix. It is the technical command of the artist, however, over the material which allows her to bring the sculptures into a precise state of  balance between roughness and finish. In a manner achieved over and again, she makes the work seem to have been torn from its mold, scratched and even pounded a bit—but not overly polished! To repeat a point, Zarina as a sculptor has invented a process whereby she can cast, color and surface her materials, in one breath.

To return to Pool I1 and Fence, taken together they make a point about geometry and stasis. Fence, incidentally, is the more silent of the two; but paradoxically, both works are oracular: they seem to announce in their abstract fashion something which can be heard as admonitory or even sacred. Though modernist and minimal, their language is bound within a tight square. Geometry creates a quite reserve which is matched by color:
 the flat grey of Fence and the more broken burnt-umber of Pool I1,
 so beautifully inflected with gold, does not move so much on the surface as it does in Pool I. This is important to note, perhaps, because the poetry of these two squares is ceremonious and still.

The last of the four squares, Homecoming, from 1981 encodes a shift in Zarina’s artistic language relative to architecture. This piece is again a perfect square; it is again a serene flat space lined by a border. What is different about it is that its border is a clearly discernible row of arches—broken and ruined arches, to be sure—but arches, nevertheless. Whether the arches are to be read as Moorish or perhaps Romanesque is not clear. But what is certain is that the depiction of a specific architectural element moves this artwork out of its pictorial abstraction and gives it a history.

We know from a photograph that these arches encode a personal memory for Zarina: they refer specifically to the arches in the courtyard of the house at Aligarh. While we did not know beforehand about the reference to home in this work, except in its title, we did see all along that it took our eye along lines of broken arcades—tracing a square which remained as ever cool, silent and melancholy. The squares are formal and abstract: they hold and yet restrain a modernist habit of mind of looking into art as though it were only fragmented interior, shattered memory and broken bits of architecture.

To emphasize this paradoxical point in another way, the squares speak in an annunciatory voice and they also remain pensive and silent. Their argument is that while their surfaces cast allusions, premonitions and emotional prophesies, they also project countervailing impulses to stillness within their abstract lines. While the works may allude to the architectural life of other places, their language can be restrained within the most restrictive geometry. It is as though this language takes up refuge in a void and frames concealments within lines and barriers. One never quite knows whether what is hidden within is mathematical or in some larger sense mystical.

Several rectangular entablatures from 1979-1981 are structurally similar to the squares. Outwardly, they develop straight-line shapes and arrange them over a grid or in a line. One work in particular, Memory of Bangkok, sets out a strict arrangement of lamp niches in identical rows. The niches are lined with “gold” leaf. This gold reflects out of the well of the deep relief enclosures when light passes over its surface at different times of day. The piece is formally minimal. It is a rectangle with no ornamentation beyond gold-bronze color and a surface indented only by straight-line shapes.

Despite its simple forms, Memory of Bangkok has great force in its presence. Around its rough edges float musings about archaeological past time: this is an artifact of a contemplative culture. Though the piece never tells us what it is, it hints at a philosophical purpose: perhaps it suggests a place for encoding law or exhorting to ritual. Perhaps its ideas,  having been set down only after long thought, express only a mystery.

During the period of these sculptures, Zarina continued to make prints as before. On occasion she took over the geometric shapes from sculpture and used them to make an etching. Memory of Bangkok, for instance, gave rise to One Morning the City was Golden. The print is quieter than its sculptural prototype—more delicate and more refined—a different order of work. Another sculpture, Wall, a clay-earth labyrinth from 1982 produced the impulse for another etching, Golden Route, on dark grey handmade paper—   printed only with a slight delicate tracing of gold-powder. Both these prints are ghostly, like mere shadows of thought. They are beautiful in the extreme; but they are nothing at all like their bold and gritty sculptural antecedents.

Beyond Geometry

The New York sculptures begin to move beyond strict geometric shapes in the 1980s and start to appear more loosely formed, out of curved or jagged irregularities. One shape is a spiral; three others are wheels. One is a rounded notched seed. Some have sharp spikes. One is a book.

Each of these pieces stands to itself and somewhat aside from the specific formalities of squares and rectangles. They begin to have fractured surfaces but all of them have “at their backs” some structural allegiance to geometric shapes. Triangles are seen inside the shapes of ten or so of these later works. Lotus, Twisted House, Roofs, and Shelter are all inhabited by triangles. There are also other fractured patterns which break up the surface of two of the rounded works. Lotus is a case in point: it is all geometry; it is just that its structure has moved beyond the flat plain surface.

The same broken geometry is seen in Twisted House. This wheel, incidentally, is such an impressive work—full of high ceremony and heraldic greeting. One imagines its placement in the tokonoma of a great, generous and learned house—all shining and turning in its silver light—its triangular plains circling about a deconstructed, modernist square center.

After a certain time Zarina’s sculptures became altogether more rounded and jagged. In some instances, they took on organic curves and remembered their geometry only within lines and notches. They began to move into new shapes and more somber meanings.

These sculptures continue to surprise us today; they continue to provoke and unnerve us slightly. As artworks, they retain the unique power of being able to turn our mind away from its focus on their beauty into a deeper perhaps darker, grasp of their melancholy and sense of loss.

(Courtesy Gallery Espace, New Delhi)