Born in Aligarh in 1937, Zarina Hashmi received a B.Sc. degree with honours from the city’s Muslim University in 1958 before she turned to the study of printmaking in India and then abroad. Between 1963 and 67 she studied printmaking with S. W. Hayter and Krishna Reddy at Atelier 17 in Paris, and in 1974 studied woodblock printing at Toshi Yoshido’s studio in Tokyo on a Japan Foundation Fellowship. The artist lives and works in New York.

Hashmi has always engaged with the politics of space and its crossings. Mirroring her own extensive travels and the multiple meanings that the word ‘home’ has for her, Hashmi’s work challenges familiar locations like ‘country’, the ways in which they are bordered, delimited and traversed, and the feelings and memories that they evoke in us. Her minimalist prints use these locations to construct new geographies, imbuing them with fresh perspectives and new, universal meanings.

In this work, Zarina reminisces about the mango trees in her Aligarh home, where she lived as a young girl. The leaves and seeds are fused in the forms she creates in the prints.