Zarina Hashmi

Zarina Hashmi, who worked simply as Zarina, was an Indian American artist who lived from 1937 to 2020 and worked as a printmaker based in New York City across drawing, printmaking and sculpture. Associated with minimalism, she used abstract and geometric forms to evoke a spiritual reaction in the viewer, drawing heavily on the geometric patterns of Islamic architectural tradition. Her work repeatedly explored home as an abstract, non physical concept, addressing displacement, movement, diaspora and exile through visual metaphors such as borders and topographical lines, as in the woodblock print Paper Like Skin, which traces a thin black line meandering upward across a white background, and the Delhi series, which drew on historical engravings of Shahjahanabad made before the siege of 1857. She trained under prominent printmakers including Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris and Toshi Yoshida in Tokyo, bringing a range of technical traditions to her practice.