“In the midst of these arid silences one picks up a few threads of texture and form.”

On viewing the drawings of Nasreen Mohamedi, one is first struck by her repudiation of the representational aesthetic that dominates the work of her contemporaries. The spare, enigmatic lines of her later works are the acme of abstraction, and her work is rooted in the abstract expressionism she first encountered while studying art in London and Paris. In her diary, she writes, “Again I am reassured by Kandinsky-the need to take from an outer environment and bring it an inner necessity.”

Mohamedi initially worked with colour, and created vivid oil paintings until the mid 1960s. At this time, she began to forge a new aesthetic, experimenting with the grid format popularized by Piet Mondrian and the Minimalists. “The grid announces among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse,” writes Rosalind Krauss, and one may find these impulses manifest in Mohamedi’s monochromatic palette and economy of form. Her work responds to the increasing influence of technology on forms of life, and her manifesto for art evokes a utilitarian mission statement. “One day all will become functional and hence good design,” she wrote in 1980. “Then there will be no waste. We will then understand basics. It will take time. But then we get the opportunity for pure patience.”