Zarina’s two periods in Delhi framed a decisive change: first the ambition to study printmaking more deeply, then the disciplined life of an artist working independently.
Delhi, 2008
1961–1963
The possibility of a new India
Zarina and Saad returned from Bangkok in 1961. Delhi had a growing art community, and for Zarina and her contemporaries it carried the hopeful possibility that art could participate in shaping a new India.
As her interest in printmaking intensified, one name recurred in her research: Stanley William Hayter. Seeing the work of Krishna Reddy, an Indian artist associated with Hayter’s Atelier 17, helped focus Zarina’s ambition to go to Paris and learn there.
1968–1974
A room of her own
When Zarina and Saad returned to Delhi in 1968, they were increasingly living separate lives. She established her own studio and worked regularly. The period demanded struggle, hard work, and determination, but it also allowed her to live more fully as an artist.
She returned to woodblock without relying only on conventionally carved blocks. She gathered discarded wood from the street, cleaned and oiled it, then inked and printed its worn grain. Influences absorbed in Paris met the physical history of local material.
“I saw myself in that wood. I was thinking a lot about the art I had seen in Paris, especially Malevich and Brancusi, and arranged the wood in abstract compositions before I printed them.”
Zarina · legacy family site, courtesy A/P/A Institute at NYU
