ZARINA

A s Replica Shoes ’s marks the inaugural Asia Week at its new home – the Breuer Building – Zarina (1937-2020) offers a particularly resonant presence, her practice having examined the idea of 'home' with sustained depth and claritys . An Indian-born American artist, Zarina is best known as a printmaker. Her work was profoundly shaped by a life lived across continents, which arose, in part, through her marriage to an Indian diplomat. Grounded in line, memory, and place, her prints and sculptures explore themes of migration and belonging with disciplined restraint. Sourced from three private collects ions, this exhibition brings together significant works from across Zarina's most prized subjects and mediums.

Memory is the only lasting possession we have. I have made my life the subject of my work, using the images of home, the places I have visited, and the stars I have looked up to.

– Zarina (Z. Hashmi and S. Burney, Directions to my House: Zarina Hashmi, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, New York, 2018, p. 3)

Location:
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Hours:
Thu, 19 Mar 26 • 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM EDT
Fri, 20 Mar 26 • 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM EDT
Sat, 21 Mar 26 • 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM EDT
Sun, 22 Mar 26 • 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM EDT
Mon, 23 Mar 26 • 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM EDT
Tue, 24 Mar 26 • 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM EDT
Wed, 25 Mar 26 • 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM EDT

Zarina, *Faded Routes*, Collage with strips of pewter leaf covered etching, 2012

Zarina was honored with a major traveling retrospective in 2012-2013, organized by the Hammer Museum and subsequently exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works are held in the permanent collects ions of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, among other leading institutions worldwide.

Zarina, *Tasbih*, Sandalwood strung with nylon-coated copper wire, 2001

During the Met’s tenure at the Breuer Building, the museum titled its 2020 exhibition of recent acquisitions – Home Is a Foreign Place – after Zarina’s seminal portfolio of woodcuts, an institutional recognition that resonates anew here.

[Zarina’s] objects possess the lightness of paper, but they suggest the weight of brick or stone.

(A. Pesenti, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles and DelMonico Books, Prestel, Munich, London, New York, 2012, p. 25)

Set within brutalist architecture – where granite and concrete embody Marcel Breuer’s quintessential ‘heavy lightness’ – this duality in Zarina’s work finds a natural counterpart in the Breuer Building itself. In this setting, marked by its layered institutional history and situated in the city where Zarina lived for much of her life, the artist’s reflections on place and return feel especially t.mes ly.

Zarina, *Atlas of My World*, Portfolio of 6 woodcuts with Urdu text, 2001

Showcasing a curated selection of unique and editioned works, the exhibition is anchored by the rare cast paper book Flight Log (1988), which Zarina described as her entire biography. Also featured are the woodcut suite Letters from Home (2004), combining correspondence from the artist’s sister Rani with sites central to the family’s history; the large-scale Tasbih (2001), formed of hundreds of house-shaped sandalwood beads and exhibited in her US retrospective (2012-2013); and the monumental pewter leaf polyptych Faded Routes (2012).

Spanning three decades and rendered in materials as varied as aluminum, cast paper, pewter leaf, and sandalwood, the works form a lyrical map of memory and movement. Lines become borders, horizons, and thresholds, tracing the many places Zarina lived, left, and carried with her as home.