Life · 1937–2020
Zarina’s biography and art are inseparable: travel, Partition, language, exile, and remembered architecture gave the work its grammar.
Artist · printmaker · sculptor
Born in Aligarh in 1937, Zarina studied mathematics before teaching herself through several printmaking traditions: woodblock in Bangkok, intaglio at Atelier 17 in Paris, and Japanese woodblock techniques in Tokyo.
Architecture and mathematics remained visible in her restrained geometries. Yet the apparent austerity of the work is softened by handmade paper, incised surfaces, gold leaf, thread, and the pressure of the carved line.
Her own life supplied the recurring subjects—home, displacement, borders, journeys, Urdu, memory, and the night sky. The result is both deeply personal and open enough to hold the experiences of others.
Aligarh, the family house, garden, first flight, and Partition.
Explore Childhood →02Parents, siblings, Rani, Saad, and the letters that crossed distance.
Explore Family →03Places lived and remembered as an autobiographical map.
Explore the Cities →
Life into practice
The work grew through travel, technical study, political history, and the daily discipline of the studio.
Her training in mathematics remained present in proportion, grids, measured intervals, and the economy of the diagram. Architecture gave those abstractions an emotional scale: the plan could become a remembered room, a boundary, or a shelter.
Bangkok introduced woodcut; Atelier 17 in Paris expanded her knowledge of intaglio; Tokyo deepened her engagement with Japanese woodblock and paper. Zarina absorbed each tradition without allowing technique to become display.
Paper was never a passive ground. She printed, cast, punctured, folded, laminated, scratched, stitched, and gilded it, attending to its fibers and edges as closely as to the image placed upon it.
From 1976, her New York loft served as home, workshop, gathering place, and intellectual base. Her participation in feminist and artist-run communities developed alongside an insistence on making a life on her own terms.
Chronology
A chronology connecting the places Zarina lived with the work she made.
Born on 16 July in Aligarh, where her father taught history at Aligarh Muslim University. The family bungalow, its garden, and its floor plan became lasting images.
The Partition of India introduced the border that would reshape her family’s life and remain a central formal and political presence in her work.
After marrying Saad Hashmi, she moved to Bangkok and began learning woodcut printing from a Thai artist.
Returned to Delhi, continuing to make art while preparing for a more sustained engagement with printmaking.
Worked at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, studying etching and viscosity printing and finding an international printmaking community.
Maintained what she described as a room of her own; in 1969 she received India’s President’s Award for Printmaking.
A period she later described in Homes I Made as an uncertain time.
On a Japan Foundation fellowship, studied Japanese woodblock printing at Toshi Yoshida’s studio and absorbed its respect for paper and precision.
Lived at the edge of temporariness before deciding to establish an independent life in New York.
Settled in New York and established the loft that became both home and studio for more than forty years.
Her husband, Saad Hashmi, died while visiting Delhi. Zarina remained in New York and continued building an independent life and practice there.
Co-curated and participated in the landmark A.I.R. Gallery exhibition of Third World women artists in the United States.
Taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, while maintaining her New York studio and moving between the two coasts.
Created this landmark portfolio after facing eviction from her New York home and studio.
Participated alongside Praneet Soi, Gigi Scaria, and Desire Machine Collective in India’s first official national pavilion, Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode, curated by Ranjit Hoskote.
A major retrospective traveled from the Hammer Museum to the Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Served as artist-in-residence at NYU’s A/P/A Institute. The residency brought together an exhibition, public programs, and an extended reflection on her life and work.
Died in London on 25 April, aged eighty-two.