Artist Zarina Hashmi passed away in London on Saturday, 25 April, after a long illness. She was 83. She had several ongoing shows, including solos at New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in Missouri, and group exhibitions at the Guggenheim and Met Breur in New York.
Poet and cultural theorist, Ranjit Hoskote, announced on Twitter about her demise. “Heartbroken to hear that Zarina Hashmi has passed away in London. She was magnificent: full of wit and shrewd wisdom, her work imbued with a tragic vision. I was privileged to have her as one of my artists in India's first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2011. RIP,” he wrote.
The Indian-born American printmaker was born in Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh in 1937. She was one of the very few women among the Indian artists of her time. Zarina, who went by her first name as an artist, worked on printmaking, sculpture and minimal drawing.
Her father, Sheikh Abdur Rasheed, was a professor of history at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and she went on to study Mathematics at AMU.
Several artists took to Twitter to pay their tributes to Zarina.