Zarina Hashmi’s prints and sculptures are as elegantly spare as they are deeply personal, each evoking some element of her long, rich, wayfaring life. They represent the borders she has crossed, the places she has lived, the techniques she has honed, the poetry she has loved, the discipline with which she works, and, above all, a long-standing relationship with her medium of choice: paper, the handmade sort, be it pressed into sheets or extracted raw from vats of pulp. She has pierced it with pinholes; embossed it with thread; sculpted it into geometric bas-reliefs; and imprinted it with maps, lines, shapes, Urdu script, and the dense, sinewy grain of unsanded planks of wood. The breadth of her output will be on display in a long-overdue retrospective, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, opening January 25th, 2013 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Read More: Zarina Hashmi at the Guggenheim