On returning to India in the early 1960s after studying in London and Paris, Nasreen broke away from the milieu of representational art pervasive in post independence India and carved out a unique space for herself at the crest of Indian modernism. Distilling her perceptions to their essence, her means to the essential, un-tethered she floated, above and away from any categorization. Extracting the structure within nature and unleashing the poetry residing within structure, Mohamedi strove to create a unity through form between the outside and the inside. The waves in the sea, the sand under the waves, the sun over the sea, in Mohamedi’s drawings they are all on a single plane, interconnected, and susceptible to the gentle variance of the viewer’s perception.

Mohamedi, employing pen and pencil, transformed sheets of paper into a tour de force. Remarkably executed over three decades ago in an environment where narrative and figurative art was the rule, Mohamedi’s clarity of pursuit and resolve is matched only by the taut tensile energy resonating through the lines. Dismantling the rigidity of the grid, she infuses them with a dynamic rhythm that at times soars, dives, expands, and collapses. Like the footsteps of sunlight through a courtyard or wind sweeping over water, they are abstract in form but not in experience. Her drawings suggest the magnanimous yet simple phenomenon so truly that they infuse an awe-inspiring chill as to the immensity of our experience and the poverty of means used to elicit it.

“Successive lines of graphite on paper, drawn at slightly varying angles, compose a fabric of traces that attain a perspectival, lyrical intensity as if floating in space.”

Adriano Pedrosa

“[Mohamedi’s] works of astonishing subtlety, faintly traced pencil drawings that have both architectural and musical overtones. Small deviations from perfect regularity set up cascading patterns, as if an Agnes Martin painting began pulsing like the ripples on the surface of a pond."

THE WASHINGTON POST

“Nasreen Mohamedi, whose extraordinary works bespeak a combination of precision and strength, delicacy and power.”

VANITY FAIR