Picture two works hanging side by side. For a moment, forget the labels. The lines are so deftly controlled, the spaces so carefully constructed, that it is easy to imagine they came from the same hand. But the artists are separated by continents, generations and circumstances. They never met, never knew of each other, and as far as records show, never encountered each other’s work. But now they share a gallery in Delhi, in a conversation neither artist could have seen coming.‘In Rhythm: Bice Lazzari and Nasreen Mohamedi’, presented by KNMA in partnership with the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre and the Archivio Bice Lazzari, places the Italian painter Lazzari, known for her minimalist abstraction, in dialogue with the Indian artist Mohamedi, whose work carries a similar stunning subtlety. The exhibition delivers a compelling lesson in brevity, in the discipline of discarding the unnecessary.Lazzari (1900–1981) and Mohamedi (1937–1990) came from different artistic worlds, but both carved out singular places in the history of modern art. Lazzari, regarded as one of the founding figures of Italian postwar abstraction, moved from painting, murals and applied design to the spare, linear language of her late acrylics, created against monochrome grounds. Her work has since been the subject of major retrospectives in Washington, London and Rome, and is often discussed alongside that of artists such as Agnes Martin. Mohamedi occupies a comparably important place in Indian modernism. Trained in London and Paris before returning to India, she taught for years at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, developing a radical minimalism and an almost poetic engagement with the grid that had few precedents in Indian art. But the exhibition does not argue that one artist influenced the other; instead, it examines the resonance between two independent paths toward abstraction.The show is curated by Andrea Anastasio, director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New Delhi, and Roobina Karode, artistic director and chief curator at KNMA. Anastasio was drawn to the idea of pairing the two artists after encountering Mohamedi’s work at a KNMA retrospective in 2012-13.Rather than proceeding chronologically, the show opens with each artist’s late, most reduced work. “We decided to start with the end of their lives, when they achieved the essence of their practice,” Anastasio says. “For both of them, lines, rhythm, space have a very important role to play. They are in a continuous dialogue,” he says. Lazzari’s early work was far removed from the spare lines and grids of her later practice. The exhibition traces her beginnings through objects, textiles and paintings shaped by Futurism and domestic materials. Mohamedi’s own trajectory was different. Her early work encompassed colour, collage, watercolour and figuration. Gradually, colour receded as line, geometry, space and interval took over.The word “subtracting” recurs throughout Anastasio’s account of both artists. “Towards the end of their lives, in subtracting and subtracting, they come across very interesting… not similarities, but reverberations of each other’s work,” he says.The physical circumstances of their later years add another layer to the show. In her later years, Mohamedi developed a neurological disorder (Huntington’s disease) that caused motor challenges, including tremors in her hands. She then adapted her technique, using precision drafting tools to continue working. Lazzari’s own departure from oil paints and tactile mixed-media (like sand and glue) was a direct reaction to physical illness caused by chronic exposure to toxic paint solvents, leading to respiratory and eye issues that forced a complete overhaul of her materials, allowing her canvases more “light, space, rigour, structure, synthesis and a little poetry”.Mohamedi’s works ask for a different kind of attention. A room devoted to them in the exhibition is conceived almost as a meditation space. Spare lines from her poems unfurl across the walls, asking viewers to stare hard, to think, to find the maximum in the minimum, all of it forming a continuity, like the immense sea. She rarely signed or dated her work and the result is an abstraction that does not ask to be decoded. “The beauty of abstraction is that the artist tries to evoke, in the most subtle way, something that is seen first inwardly, more than outwardly,” says Anastasio. That inwardness shapes the exhibition’s treatment of space too. The curators build an intimate, almost domestic environment in one section before opening it out toward a larger sense of landscape and horizon.There is, finally, a parallel in how the two women came to be recognised. Lazzari was known within artistic circles during her lifetime but did not achieve mainstream recognition. The Guggenheim Foundation had acquired one of her works as early as the 1930s, but wider acknowledgement came much later.
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Mohamedi’s posthumous recognition followed a similarly delayed arc.The exhibition is, in the end, more than a comparison of two artists who happened to use lines. It asks what happens when two women, working independently and without any direct exchange, arrive at a shared insistence on restraint.‘In Rhythm’ will be on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, till 22 Dec.
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