Little known outside of her home country until recently, Nasreen Mohamedi was a unique figure in the Indian art world, and the author of an oeuvre that is belatedly finding its place as a key component of the Modernist canon. Her most important works, modestly sized drawings in pen and pencil on paper, would fit almost in their entirety into a single drawer - and indeed that is how many of them were found after her death, stored in her studio and apartment along with her diaries. Born in Karachi in 1937, Nasreen Mohamedi moved with her family to Mumbai (then Bombay) at the age of seven. In 1954 she enrolled at St Martin's School of Art in London, and after graduating joined her father and brother in the Persian Gulf, where the family had business interests. She returned to India in 1958, and settled first in Mumbai, then Delhi and finally Baroda, where she became a faculty member of the Fine Art Department of the M.S. University in 1973. She died in 1990 from Parkinson's disease.

Mohamedi's abstract art was not without precedent in India. On her return to Mumbai she joined the Bhulabhai Institute, where she came into contact with the city's avant-garde. A decade after Independence, Mumbai was - as it is now - an important artistic centre and an economic hub: a diverse and cosmopolitan metropolis, home to a group of artists who practised a bold, abrasive and self-proclaimed Modernist style. The Progressive Artists Group, founded by F.N. Souza in 1947 and including M.F. Hussain, S.H. Raza, Tyab Mehta and V.S. Gaitonde, was an initiative that 'pitched into the heroic narrative of modern art and produced a formalist manifesto that was to help the first generation of artists in Independent India position themselves internationally'.¹ Although the group had officially disbanded by the time of Mohamedi's return to Mumbai, she became associated with many of its former members and was influenced by the group's abstract tendencies, developed by Raza and in particular by Gaitonde, who became her mentor. In Gaitonde's almost monochrome canvases and their watery ambient spaces interrupted by areas of turbulence and surface distortion, there are correspondences with Mohamedi's oils, her collages and her works on paper from the early 1960s. By 1973, when she finally settled in Baroda, abstraction was on the wane in India, definitively replaced in the 1980s by a figurative narrative style that had been made famous by artists such as Bhupen Khakhar and Gulammohammed Sheikh. Mohamedi's own commitment to abstraction, however, became even stronger, and she progressively moved into new territory, producing a singular language of and on her own.

Mohamedi's works were almost never dated, and therefore it is difficult to construct a precise chronology of her practice. Instead, the tendency is to bracket them approximately as being from a certain period - such as 'late 1970s' or 'mid-1980s' - on the basis of the more or less accurate accounts of her peers. Her works can, however, be separated into roughly three phases. In the 1960s and early 70s her use of abstraction is still partly referential, suggesting atmospheric landscapes including the representation of plants and trees. The works from this period come in a variety of sizes and media, and typically emphasise brush stroke (at times influenced by Japanese calligraphy) and wash. After this came a process of subtraction, in which all traces of figuration were edited out. Taking the grid as a template, she began working with ruled lines, using pen and pencil and square sheets of paper. This period has come to be seen as the artist's classic phase, when she produced an extensive series of cerebral and exquisitely rendered works. During the final decade of her life, Mohamedi abandoned the grid, a move she considered an achievement. Working on rectangular sheets of paper, she produced geometric forms - including arcs, chevrons, diagonal lines and half circles - that float freely within an empty space. In addition to her drawings, other important aspects of her practice include black-and-white photographs, mostly of architecture, landscapes and light; and her diaries, whose pages are covered with horizontal washes of ink in subdued colours, interspersed with text. Although included in shows today, Mohamedi never considered either the photographs or the diaries suitable for public exhibition. She also made sound recordings, a little known aspect of her practice of which there is only anecdotal evidence.

Mohamedi's relationship to the grid as a compositional device (used over an extended period of time) was crucially different from that of Minimalist artists such as Carl Andre and Donald Judd. For them the grid, in its pure form, is a readymade that, along with the series, works against hierarchy, expression or emotion; their attitude was systematic, numerical and pre-given. Mohamedi also uses both the grid and the series, but breaks these rules. For example, she puts the surface of the paper under slight pressure as her hand makes a mark just subtly darker than the last, so that the sequential fragmentation of little lines gives the effect of engineered movement, and the long, slanting ones create an illusion of interiority and depth. As a result, the grid hovers and shifts in space, unravelling like a textile weave coming undone.

Perhaps Mohamedi can be called a post-Minimalist, in the sense defined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971, when he saw the grammar of the 'parent style' being deployed in a range of new and interesting ways that undermined its logic, while at the same time still making use of its possibilities.² He identified the three principle strains of this development as 'Pictorial/Sculptural', reflecting a re-emergence of an interest in subjectivity and expression; 'Epistemology', based in the heretical use of numbering and ordering systems; and 'Ontological', the focusing on temporality and the body. While Mohamedi was operating outside of the chronologies of European and North American art (where, amongst other things, this shift was in response to a specific set of social and political circumstances as well as to the sequential logic of art movements), it could be argued that, for her own particular reasons, she used the sequence and grid in accordance with all three of Pincus-Witten's definitions.

Mohamedi is often compared to Agnes Martin, with whom a striking number of parallels can be found. It is unclear when Mohamedi became aware of Martin's work, but from her contemporaries' account, it seems that it was late - too late for Martin's work to have acted as an influence. One can find many formal elements common to both artists: the grid of pencil lines, the slight fluctuations on the surface of the work, the interstitial tension between positive and negative beats, and the use of the diagonal. They also share habits and character traits, such as a pull towards the metaphysical, an attraction to the boundless open spaces of the ocean and the desert, and the use of poetic writing to describe their own work. The references attributed to them by others are also often the same - Donald Judd talked approvingly about one of Martin's works as a weave.³ But unlike Martin, for whom compositional coherence and overall harmony of the image result in works which are more or less complete in themselves, Mohamedi's drawings are extremely engineered and, like architectural blueprints (or other kinds of technical drawing), seem to chart out hypothetical spaces: utopian vistas perhaps, futuristic urban landscapes or even flight paths.

Particularly in her later works, this tendency brings Mohamedi closer to Kazimir Malevich than Agnes Martin, and his positing of both the mystical and the concrete. Mohamedi's force fields, architectonic planes and machines that float in the sky echo Malevich's interest in physics, and she too, in an intuitive rather than scientific fashion, jotted down the directional path of energy flows and the evolution of forms on bits of paper. What Mohamedi also took from the Russian avant-garde, although more as an attitude than a practice, was a belief in a set of aesthetic principles underpinning art and design that could be used to transform society. As Malevich said, 'three cheers for the overthrow of art. Three cheers for the new world of things.'⁴ And as Mohamedi later wrote in her diary, 'One day all will become functional and hence good design. There will be no waste.We will then understand basics. It will take time.'⁵ This relationship to design is evident in her work, and its proximity creates a link to a range of applied arts that can be seen every day in India - from the chevrons and diagonals on mass-produced printed shirts, to the geometric arrangement of tiles on walls or the metal lattice of window grills or gates. And it is tempting to speculate that perhaps her closest aesthetic allies in abstraction were the students and teachers at the pioneering National Institute of Design in nearby Ahmadabad, whom she frequently visited. Here a late Modernist aesthetic was put to use in industry in the belief that good design would contribute to economic development. It is also possible that the influence of her work, barely detectable in the several generations of art students that passed through her classes at Baroda, rippled out into the world and was picked up by default, transmitted through the creations of young Indian textile weavers, typographers and industrial designers.

When thinking about Nasreen Mohamedi, we have to ask what existential need brought about her practice, her persona and the position of both in the wider world. What made her dedicate her life to such a singular body of work? The answer must be bound up with the details of her biography, and with what she drew from her immediate context. Facts from her life - her role as a woman in the society she lived in; her emotional disposition, taste and discipline; her relation to a small, closely knit group of artists; her exposure from an early age to a diverse set of cultural practices; and the social and political context of India after Independence - are some of the grounds on which she built a sovereign self. Individual elements from this list are sometimes brought to the fore as a way of positioning her in historical or curatorial terms. For example, the image of Mohamedi as a female artist working within a certain trajectory of Modernism is frequently used to define her, as is the influence of Islamic abstraction in her work. But extracting any of these elements from the broader picture flattens and simplifles the person and the work, and the key is rather to look at how she both co-mingles and transcends her own particularities.

For a more calibrated understanding of the artist, the insights of her peers and her diaries constitute a valuable source of information. Picking through the various myths that have grown around her like private folklore, we learn, for instance, that she was an 'eccentric' figure in her everyday environment, though beautiful and elegantly dressed; that she was quiet but not shy, and that when she spoke it was often in broken, interrupted sentences; that she was a diligent, meticulous worker, a virtuoso who sat cross-legged at her table working into the night, abandoning many of her drawings for being insufficiently accomplished and often giving them away; that she liked to listen to both classical Indian and popular music on her radio; and that she appreciated the precise movements in Bruce Lee's kung fu films. In order to piece together this kind of anecdotal information with facts about her work, I worked with Suman Gopinath from CoLab Art & Architecture, an art institution in Bangalore, and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) in Oslo to organise a workshop on Mohamedi in Delhi, which included many of her colleagues and students. Sitting around a table, the cross-referencing of different memories and points of view generated new insights into Mohamedi and her work, producing a colloquial art-historical text and giving rise to many of the observations in this essay. The other important voice in the equation is Mohamedi's own, made accessible through her diaries, which, written over an extended period of time, show her personal development as well as her development as an artist. They reveal how often in her life and work 'order is preceded by turbulence'.⁶ In these diaries, Mohamedi comes across as someone mediating the tensions between inner experience and outer reality, as someone who used her work to filter her impressions of the visual field, and to align and regulate the pressures of the ego. They reveal in her a mixture of receptivity and the need for compression, like a wide-open photographic lens that renders the world's imprint and reduces it to the minimum. For Mohamedi, the price of equilibrium was restraint, and her diary entries attest to the constant call for greater effort and self-discipline. What results from this is the carefully crafted but liminal space of autonomy necessary for maintaining composure in an overbearing world. Perhaps this very autonomy is what allowed her to draw in so much, and 'selfabsorption becomes paradoxically a condition of openness to the intersection of visions and languages'.⁷ Certainly, in the small hermetic space of her works, the attention given to the particular opens up onto to the universal. Their lack of referent also makes them available to projections and interpretations of all kinds, something that has facilitated their translation and that is probably partly responsible for their sudden popularity outside of India. This is not to suggest a contrast between the works' reception in its original context and elsewhere.

Mohamedi's practice was always destined for a wider audience that she, ever the internationalist, was already addressing. Presenting her work today and tracing the arc of meaning as it circulates more widely in the world is not to seek a posthumous legitimacy, for she has her place within Indian art history as well as within the Modernist canon. Rather, it is a question of establishing an ethical placement of her practice that meets the needs of a contemporary paradigm. Today's interest appears both in response to the sheer accomplishment of the work itself - its gravitas, its beauty - and because of current preoccupations of the art world, specifically an interest in histories of Modernism outside the Western mainstream, and in recuperating practices of women artists who have been previously overlooked - a set of concerns with which Mohamedi's work neatly overlaps. These concerns, however, are sometimes at odds with how she intended her work to be viewed. For instance, she rarely exhibited during her lifetime and rejected invitations to participate in exhibitions of only women artists. As a footnote to this, her photographic studies were never meant to be shown (she worried that they would establish literal parallels with her drawings), but now they are regularly seen as works in their own right. The moniker of Modernism, which is routinely applied to her, is not incorrect but sits precariously, in that the work was made later than Modernism in the usual chronology. The category of 'alternative Modernism', which can be used to for account for this, is helpful in thinking beyond the Euro-American paradigm and outside of a strict sense of period, but in itself can be a catch-all term used to describe an incredibly diverse range of practice. Clearly her work is susceptible to readings and interpolations that draw it in various directions. Having worked with it now for ten years, I have seen its reception shift in relation to different exhibition settings.

In 'Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawing' (co-curated with Suman Gopinath in 2000) we positioned the artist alongside two others from India in a configuration that emphasised the use of line in networking a range of local and global elements. Then, selecting and installing drawings, photographs and the diaries for documenta 12 (2007), I saw how the work was experienced by a larger audience than ever, becoming the object of interest and acclaim. In this context the work was positioned within an intuited history based on affinity, alongside artists such as Atsuko Tanaka, with whom she was placed in direct relation, and more distantly Mira Schendel. Most recently, the exhibition 'Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes' at OCA placed Mohamedi's practice within a more specifically autobiographical and chronological frame, highlighting the need for continued research particularly in the form of a catalogue raisonné. But, as Geeta Kapur notes, like any important body of work, all these references, imbibed and generated by Mohamedi, need not be channelled into a 'standard, single-track reading'. Instead the work should be allowed to make a 'graceful passage' through them, while at the same time maintaining its specificity and internal coherence.⁸

- Grant Watson