Nasreen Mohamedi Influences

Nasreen Mohamedi lived a cosmopolitan life that brought inspiration to her work from many different places and cultures. Mohamedi was born in 1937 in Karachi, India, an area that would later become Pakistan. In the mid-forties the artist lived in Mumbai, before spending relocating to London and attending St. Martin 's School of the Arts, in London in the late fifties. The artist lived for a short time with her family in Bahrain, a small island country off the western shores of the Persian gulf. In the sixties she lived and studied with a scholarship in Paris before returning to India. There she joined the Bhulabhai Institute for the Arts in Mumbai. The Bhulabhai Institute also included famous Indian artists like V.S. Gaitonde,Tyeb Mehta, and …show more content…
She travelled extensively and was influenced by the deserts, seas, Zen asthetics, and Islamic architecture that she was exposed to. Mohamedi was also deeply conscious of her self and her body as they moved through space and time. Mohamedi is most often associated with Agnes Martin, an American painter known for her abstract expressionism. Mohamedi was not aware of Martin until late in the career, and her similar use of lines and grids is purely coincidental. Mohamedi attended the Bhulabhai Institute of the arts with V.S. Gaitonde, the 20th century’s most famous Indian abstract artist, as well as Tyeb Mehta, a renowned painter and member of the Bombay Progressive Artists ' Group. Both artists were inspirations for and mentors of Mohamedi throughout the 1960s. She also spent time around M.F. Husain, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, Arpita Singh, and Bhupen Khakhar. Mohamedi stated in her writing that she was greatly influenced by the utopian designs of constructivist artists like Kasimir Malevich, whom she greatly admired. This influence can easily be seen in her use of geometric shapes and lines, as well as her ability to morph nature into a linear