Overview

Featuring more than 50 of her works, Nasreen Mohamedi runs in parallel with Mondrian and his Studios, and charts the evolution of Mohamedi’s work, exploring how she, like Mondrian, moved away from a figurative style and developed her own unique approach to abstraction.

This exhibition highlights significant phases in the artist’s practice; from semi-abstract lyrical paintings of the 1960s to her intricate engagement and subversion of the modernist grid throughout the 1970s, and detailed drawings of suspended diagonal lines, triangles, and spheres in the 1980s. The latter recalls the utopian designs of constructivist artists such as Kazimir Malevich, who she greatly admired. A further highlight will be Mohamedi’s personal photographic practice through which she maintained a visual record of her experiences, capturing images of desert landscapes, seascapes, modern structures, and the Islamic architecture of Fatehpur Sikri.

Despite comparisons to American artists such as Agnes Martin and Carl Andre, Mohamedi’s work defies easy categorization and was the product of her distinctive personality, process, and aesthetic values. Nasreen Mohamedi reveals the artist’s significant contribution to modernism that expands the boundaries of Western art history and offers an opportunity to reconsider the meaning of abstract art.

“Nasreen Mohamedi”, Tate, Liverpool. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/nasreen-mohamedi