EXHIBITION | “Nasreen Mohamedi: From the Glenbarra Art Museum” puts the spotlight on her abstractionist art

Published : Dec 01, 2022 10:30 IST It is a mellow evening at Sunaparanta, Goa’s cultural centre, a space at once elegant and intimate. A small gathering of people is scattered around the inner courtyard of this beautiful heritage property for the opening of an exhibition, “Nasreen Mohamedi: From the Glenbarra Art Museum”, composed of the artist Nasreen Mohamedi’s works from the Glenbarra Art Museum in Himeji, Japan. She remembers Nasreen as a minimalist in life as in art: “I was amazed at how she could live with such few things.” Born into a progressive family, Nasreen studied art at St Martin’s in England and then taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, in Baroda; her work was the sum of her education, upbringing, influences, and experiences. In Geeta Kapur’s essay “Elegy for the Unclaimed Beloved: Nasreen Mohamedi ”, featured in the exhibition catalogue but originally published in the monograph Nasreen in Retrospect, we are told of the deep impression made on Nasreen not only by artists like Kandinsky and Klee but also by Camus, Plato, and ideologies like utopian abstraction and constructivism; the latter, says Kapur, “use geometrical means… to celebrate a futurist plan of the world…” Most who knew Nasreen and have written about her also mention her spiritual bent of mind: her interest in Sufism and Zen philosophy. It was in 1994, four years after Nasreen’s death, that Altaf and Navjot held the first retrospective of her works titled “Nasreen In Retrospect” at Jehangir Art Gallery and Chemould Gallery in Mumbai.