If you ever had the pleasure of visiting Zarina Hashmi, the preeminent visual artist, at her apartment in Chelsea, Manhattan, in New York City, you will recall two things that stood out. The first was her impressive library of meticulously arranged books on every subject of art history accompanied by a printmaker’s press.

The second was her beloved nature; an eagerness to charm guests through her knowledge, hospitality and a wonderful sense of humour.

And even though she had lived in the same apartment for over forty years (ever since her arrival in the United States in 1975), ‘home’ had always meant to her the house she was born in, in Aligarh in 1937.

“New York is not my home; this is someone else’s home. I’ve lived here for 40 years, but my identity is basically that of an exile,” she would say.

Zarina, as she preferred to be called, passed away on April 25 at the age of 83 in London.

Throughout her long battle with several ailments, she resiliently fought Alzheimer’s in private, allowing only close friends to be on hand for support. Her niece, with whom she had an incredible bond, finally took her to London. Many of her friends and admirers will see her passing away as a release from the pain and incapacity that stalked her final years.

Most people will remember Zarina as a quietly spoken, courteous and charming octogenarian, but she was also a thinker, buoyed by a solid core of conviction.

Unphased by occasional criticisms that her work was repetitive, she remained inclined to take this as a compliment.

In the opening lines of her memoirs Directions To My House (with Sarah Burney), Zarina writes: “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. I just want a reminder that I did not imagine my experiences.”

Zarina’s series of woodcuts and chin colle, and paper pulp reliefs is a moving and thought-provoking meditation on loss, new beginnings and ways of remembering.

Her work eloquently reveals shifts in thinking over time in relation to commemorating major turning points in history, such as the Partition in 1947, and the people who endured in her memory.

Her work follows the approach that attains its special power through the physical and conceptual nature of its construction – through the evocative, poetic resonances emanating from the interrelations of the parts to the whole. Like the Urdu alphabets and words engraved in wood blocks, their sounds evoke in direct and poetic ways those distant voices that echo from the past into the present. Contemplating the prints and their imagery as a whole, particular experience becomes intertwined with the universal, calling to mind the many individuals who have departed from their original lands and travelled across vast oceans to find new beginnings, creating an awareness of life and the resonances of memory across time and space.

At heart, Zarina was a classically minded modernist, who described her style as ‘precise, clear and deliberate,’ yet she was also a deeply spiritual person who was born in Aligarh, India, in 1935.

She showed an aptitude for art at an early age, and recalled her infancy as a period in which she spent a considerable amount of time watching and observing her father who was a professor of history. Although her family relocated to Karachi in the ‘50s, she got married in 1958 and travelled extensively with her husband, Saad Hashmi who was in the Indian Foreign Service. For twenty years the couple travelled around the globe. This afforded Zarina the privilege of mobility unheard of for women coming from her part of South Asia in those days.

Zarina started off her career in printmaking and sculpture in the 1960s by first training in Thailand. She continued to learn printmaking with SW Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris, followed by stints at St Martin’s School of Art, London, and Tokyo where she studied woodblock printing under Toshi Yoshida in 1974. “…Hayter was a great teacher. He showed me there are no shortcuts in prints. Like when you solve a problem in mathematics, you can’t jump a step because you’ll get caught,” confided the artist.

Zarina returned to Delhi, a haven for retired colonels and post-colonial properness where her ‘Muslimness’ demanded an explanation, giving her work a politicised interpretation.

In 1975, she landed in the US, first settling in Los Angeles and finally in New York. She moved to New York, the move that sharpened a sense of placement and displacement, but here Zarina found less pressure to answer all those questions – and the work could be more honest.

Her work commanded a territory that was taut with a very fragile tension.

Long before the age of political correctness, Zarina was a vocal supporter of ethics and fairness in the society. She rigorously defended the conviction that women should be allowed a ‘place in the sun’ as editor of Heresies – a feminist journal. While working on the cover story Third World Women: The Politics of Being Other, she came into conflict with fellow editors on the disparaging tone that the term Third World carried.

Her friend Ana Mendieta invited her to co-curate for AIR Gallery – an invitation that Zarina declined.

The idea of house/home continued to engage Zarina almost throughout her career. Back in the 1980s, she created reliefs and forms in cast paper, and the series it gave birth to was baptised as Kaghaz ke Ghar. “Because these images in cast paper are tangible, they substantiate the idea of permanence; yet they retrieve the past and yield to the idea of impermanence.”

There is an early sculpture called Places to Hide and another called Twisted House. “Several forms focus on structural elements of the house, Wall, Roof, Steps, Corners; then the house extends into the garden with the Seed, Rock, Lotus and Phool,” confesses Zarina.

Home, migration, exile, displacement, boundaries, maps, journeys, distances and memory remained Zarina’s recurrent leitmotifs, starting with The House in Aligarh, followed by House With Four Walls, House of Many Rooms, Homes I Made/A Life in Nine Lines, Home is a Foreign Place, Atlas of my World, House on Wheels (cast and painted aluminium) and These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness – the last series based on maps of contested territories devastated by war and conflict.

Like the places she lived in, Zarina’s work gave her shelter. In her work, home, somehow, remained a fluid, abstract space that transcended physicality or location. As Zarina would often quote Ghalib: Be dar-o-deewar sa ik ghar banaya chahiye.

In 1991, she illustrated in woodcut ten Urdu proverbs selected from the book of 100 Urdu proverbs compiled by her sister Kishwar Chishti alias Rani, as part of the residency at Women’s Studio Workshop at Rosendale, NY.

Considering Letters from Home – a series of facsimile prints of unsent letters from her sister Rani, written in states of mourning and overlaid by Zarina with bold floorplans and architectural outlines – Zehra Jumabhoy suggested that the work “hovers between political loss and personal grief – floating in the unbridgeable gulf between nation and self.”

While the western critic labeled her imagery as minimalist, and repeatedly likened it to Sol le Witt and Richard Serra, in my opinion it is to the Japanese modernists of woodblock printing, Zarina owes the most.

Brevity and incisiveness are the governing principles of her entire practice where ‘less is more,’ employing metaphor instead of symbol.

Zarina was always impeccably dressed either in a tussar silk shalwar kamees or sari and shawl, more like a relaxed housewife than a dauber. The precision of her intellect was no less manicured.

Her knowledge of literature was vast: Borges’s short stories, the poetry of Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Iqbal, Rumi, Adrienne Rich and Emily Dickinson, to name just a few old favourites, were all subject to intelligent if not distinctive admiration. Her views were even-handed, and her prejudices mostly well-reasoned and concisely stated.

Zarina left her homeland. Her migration from India to the United States may not appear as a big journey. However, the impact of migration might be better understood in terms of the shift in ways of seeing the world.

The distance she travelled was not as significant as the degree of change in perspective. Travel had not so much broadened the imagination, but highlighted the sense of loss and absence that pervades the modern city and its culture.

Zarina followed a search for the paths and signs that could provide a sense of where we are in this world. She questioned the conventional landmarks and maps that are used to designate location and direction. She provided a double take on what we can see and how to get there. Underlying her approach was an ongoing oscillation between the axioms of absence and presence, horizon and home.

In 2011, the curator, Ranjit Hoskote, chose Zarina to represent India at the Venice Biennale. A year later, retrospective of her work was held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles that travelled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Last year, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St Louis, USA, and Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi, India, mounted a major survey of her work. Her monograph Paper Like Skin, showed the underlying strength of her artistic practice over decades. Zarina’s work will always be recognised as an art of affirmation, by turns cosmic and intimate. It is a rare distinction for an artist to have cast off the gloom and the angst of the modern era, to come out on the side of the angels. Her epitaph should read:

Meray ghar ka seedha  sa itna pata hai

Yeh ghar jo hai chaaron taraf se khula hai

Na dastak zaroori, na awaz dena

Meray ghar ka darwaza koi nahin hai

Hain deewaren gum aur chhat bhi nahin hai

— Sudarshan Faakir