Lazzari and Mohamedi: When two artists search for the same silence

NewsIndia NewsLazzari and Mohamedi: When two artists search for the same silence Lazzari and Mohamedi: When two artists search for the same silence Installation view In-Rhythm, Bice Lazzari and Nasreen Mohamedi at KNMA Saket 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. Nasreen Mohamedi , Photo by _Jyoti Bhatt, Courtesy_ Heirs of Nasreen Mohamedi 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.

Join conversation InsightfulAgreeDisagreeSkepticalConcerningPromisingWorth ReadingBig Development 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.

Get the latest India News and Live updates. Download the TOI app. Sneha Bhura is an Assistant Editor with The Times of India. She loves exploring stories at the intersection of culture and technology. She is also a published poet and podcaster.

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