An exhibition at Tate Liverpool reveals an artist whose quest for utopian design and universal forms has placed her as a modern master.

Nasreen Mohamedi (left) in a photograph from the Sikander and Hydari collection
Nasreen Mohamedi (left) in a photograph from the Sikander and Hydari collection - It is the day after Eid, Kick has just released and a larger, noisier crowd than usual is gathered outsideactor Salman Khan's building inMumbai, chanting. But he is not theonly celebrity who resides here. Round the back, where the voices fade, in a bungalow well-hidden from the road, several Nasreen Mohamedis line the walls of her family home. Nasreen's nephew, Nisar, the son of one of her four older sisters, and husband of artist Shrilekha Sikander, also Nasreen's student at Baroda's M.S. University where she served on the faculty from 19721988, recalls running around at the age of nine amidst her friends, among them artist Vasudeo Gaitonde, Nasreen's mentor. He recounts how they, his own father and Nasreen's father, would chide her: "What are you doing, drawing lines? I sent you to St Martin's in England and all you are doing is this? Can you paint? Can you draw?" This was the age when painting was, Nisar explains, what you drew from life, figurative. The two men would often sit and play chess at the family bungalow in Kihim. One day, says Nisar, Nasreen drew, within seconds, the bare outline of a portrait of the two men playing chess. "It was such a keen likeness, drawn with such obvious dexterity, so minimalistic and yet so breathtaking, that it shut both of them up for the rest of her life," Nisar laughs. The drawing, which hangs on the wall of the Sikanders' dining hall, is one of the few portraits Nasreen drew in her life. Nasreen's retrospective featuring 50 works, one of her largest solos in the UK, is on at the Tate Liverpool, as part of 'Mondrian and his Studios & Nasreen Mohamedi', two complementary exhibitions that will be on till October; the work of Kazimir Malevich, a constructivist master and one of Nasreen's major influences, is simultaneously on display at the Tate Modern in London. The exhibit places Nasreen, who died in 1990 at the age of 53, squarely in the context of the global non-objective movement, as an artist, rather than a particularly Indian artist. The Piet Mondrian exhibit, of the turn-of-the-20th century Dutch painter who was part of the De Stijl art movement, is curated by Francesco Manacorda, artistic director, Tate Liverpool, along with Michael White, reader in History of Art at the University of York and Eleanor Clayton, assistant curator, Tate Liverpool. Nasreen Mohamedi is curated by Eleanor Clayton and Suman Gopinath, independent curator from India. With it, the recent resurgence of interest in Nasreen's work, a tempo that has only accelerated since the solo at the 'Documenta 12' in Germany in 2007, and crowned by the Kiran Nadar year-long retrospective in Delhi in 2013, is expanding even further. "When I began working with Nasreen's drawings in 1999, there hadn't been a significant exhibition of her works ever since the retrospective exhibition soon after her death. It was very difficult to even locate and find her work for 'Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawing'-the exhibition that Grant Watson and I curated in 2000," says Gopinath. The solo exhibition they curated called 'Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes' travelled to seven countries in Europe from 2009 to 2011. Nasreen died before the globalisation of the art world, and in the period between her death and her rediscovery in the early 2000s-the Talwar Gallery showed a solo in 2003 in New York- there was a very real danger of our losing her. Deepak Talwar, of Talwar Gallery, which handles Nasreen's estate, believes the expansion of awareness has only just begun. "Nasreen is the artist who makes them rewrite modern art history," he says. Indeed, the resurgence is the culmination of a number of curatorial efforts; from her close friend, curator Gita Kapoor, who has been writing about her for 23 years; Roobina Karode, curator at the Kiran Nadar Institute, who lived just down the road from the artist in Delhi; and the studies of Gopinath and Talwar. As an artist who lived and worked in the bon vivant shadows of giants like M.F. Husain, Bhupen Khakhar, Tyeb Mehta and F.N. Souza, painter Nilima Sheikh refers to Nasreen among friends fondly as "the youngest Progressive". When Shrilekha went to Baroda in 1969, and by the time Nasreen joined the faculty in 1972, she recalls, the students knew little of her or her work. Baroda at the time was a bastion of greats, dean K.G. Subramanyan was also head of the painting department; Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Gaitonde and Khakhar were all in residence. "There were not many students and most of our teachers were male. It was good to have a female teacher," Shrilekha, who was to meet her husband through Nasreen, says. She had a quiet way of listening and altering the girls' perspective to see into nuances of shadows and light. While she was only seen in cotton saris in public, Nasreen wore a long skirt and top to work in, choosing to work only at night, the repetitive strains of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi always looping around her. Detached, silent, enmeshed in Zen and Sufism, even the sole newspaper she got every morning was something to wrap things in for Nasreen, and never read. In her cupboard, to the end of her life, were a few saris, blouses and petticoats and her necklaces, arranged in neat lines. In her fridge, white ceramic bowls with a few sprouts. In her barsati room when she later moved to New Delhi, just a mattress on the floor and a desk to work on. She was minimalism itself. "She was one person who was always in tune-work, life, the way she dressed, how she talked, behaved- each always totally in tune with the other, one straight line" Shrilekha says. Her brother, Altaf Mohamedi, was a very different kind of artist. Nasreen's bent was more spiritual, so she couldn't understand the leftist arguments he made. She was deeply into physics and would get one of her students, Archana Shastri, to teach her the subject. She saw a Bollywood movie once, laughs Nisar, and watched the 1965 Beatles film Help!several times over. In that early period in Baroda, Shrilekha recalls, Nasreen's work was abstract, but drawn from landscape, plants. It was only later on that she began to do the line drawings. Baroda became the most productive phase of her life.

Nasreen Mohamedi’s is an intriguing world. Abstract pencil lines and geometric patterns float in the vacuity of a piece of paper. On others, complex yet organic structures weaving against each other create an illusionary universe, giving a sense of the artist’s obscure inner dialogue. Undated and untitled, and 24 years after her death, Mohamedi’s drawings still leave a viewer unsettled. Recent years have seen efforts to unravel the mystery behind the late artist — notably, solos at Milton Keynes Gallery (UK, 2009) and Talwar Gallery (New York, 2008), and a retrospective at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (Delhi, 2013). On June 6, an exhibition at Tate Liverpool titled “Nasreen Mohamedi” will be the biggest solo of the artist in the UK, which will span her work from the ’60s to the ’80s.

There are over 60 works on display, acquired from various public institutions and private collections. The exhibition has been curated by Eleanor Clayton, assistant curator at the Tate Liverpool, who started exploring Mohamedi’s oeuvre when she was putting together Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s work for the gallery (it will open simultaneously with Mohamedi’s show). “I grew obsessed with her intricate line drawings and earlier oil paintings, particularly in conjunction with her diaries, which reveal a constant quest for utopian design and balance in her work,” says Clayton, “Although Nasreen and I come from different places and times, learning about her work has made me view the world in a new way, seeing the abstract and universal beauty she focused on landscapes, from India to the Mersey river.”

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While her line drawings are the most popular aspect of her oeuvre, what is also fascinating is Mohamedi’s photographic prints, known for their unique architectural quality. A well-travelled artist, Mohamedi took photographs in several places in the Middle East (she lived in Bahrain briefly in her youth), the US and Japan, apart from various cities in India including Chandigarh. For Clayton, her photographs, which highlight geometric shapes and lines in her surroundings through particular crops, mirrored how Mondrian began his path to abstraction, a reason why the two exhibitions will open simultaneously.

Another significant aspect is Mohamedi’s diaries, which reveals the artist’s mind at work. On display at Tate Liverpool are extracts, notes and source material she kept in her studio.