Monday, January 20, 2014

The New York Times Nasreen Mohamedi: ‘Becoming One’

 
                By Holland Cotter | January 17 , 2014
 
 
 
An untitled work by Nasreen Mohamedi from one of her notebooks, part of the “Becoming One” show at Talwar Gallery.
Talwar Gallery
108 East 16 Street
Through January 25  

The show reveals, among other things, how original and personal her art was. As an international traveler, she was well versed in European art, but it would be a mistake to try to find her roots in Western movements like Constructivism and Minimalism. Her primary inspirations were more culturally specific and concrete.
Her photographs of details of Indian architecture, urban and Islamic, of desert landscape and of weaving still on the loom were the visual sources for many of the drawings. And, as her notebooks suggest, her drawing was, functionally, as intimate as formal handwriting, in which discipline and expressivity were inseparable. Mohamedi died of a neurological disorder similar in its symptoms to Parkinson’s disease. Tremors made both drawing and writing extremely difficult, but she continued to do both.
In her last journal entry, she writes: “Vibrations multiply. Intensity of sweep. Undulative. Curve slowly comes to a …,” and the writing falters, jumps, drifts off like a thread unspooling, but finally forms a closed circle. I can’t imagine seeing a more beautiful and tender gallery solo this winter.

UPCOMING
RANJANI SHETTAR

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