Artist · Printmaker · Sculptor
“I just made my personal life the subject of my art.”
Zarina
1937 — 2020Aligarh · Bangkok · New Delhi · Paris · BonnTokyo · Los Angeles · Santa Cruz · New York · London
Four themes
A life held in paper and line
Four ways into a practice shaped over more than five decades.
Home
gharFloor plans, remembered rooms, and the houses carried within us.
Home Is a Foreign Place · 1999
Borders
sarhadLines drawn, crossed, and redrawn across maps and lives.
Dividing Line · 2001
Memory
yaadLetters, fragments, and the things kept because they could not be carried.
Letters from Home · 2004
Language
zabaanUrdu as a home that could survive distance and exile.
Urdu Proverbs · 2011Selected works
Across the collection
Life
A life across cities and borders
Born in Aligarh in 1937, Zarina made paper, line, language, and the architecture of memory into a body of work of uncommon intimacy and rigor.
“Home is not a place. It is something that follows you.”Read the chronology →
On view & recent
Exhibitions
UpcomingFragilityMenil Drawing Institute · Houston↗CurrentFive Centuries of Works on Paper: The Grunwald Center at 70, Part IIHammer Museum · Los Angeles↗RecentDirections to My HouseSTPI · Singapore↗RecentMapping Otherwise: Between the Ocean and the SkyWallach Art Gallery, Columbia University · New York↗RecentUrdu WorldsIshara Art Foundation · Dubai↗RecentDialogues & ConversationsPulitzer Arts Foundation · St. Louis↗RecentBeyond the StarsLuhring Augustine Tribeca · New York↗
Research
Sources for the work and life
Museum collections, archival papers, oral histories, catalogues, and gallery records.
Explore sources →