I saw In Rhythm at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, bringing together Bice Lazzari and Nasreen Mohamedi, and I came away deeply moved. I have been a great admirer of Nasreen for a long time, so seeing her work in conversation with Lazzari felt especially revealing. The exhibition brings together two artists who never met, yet arrived independently at remarkably close ways of thinking through line, repetition, geometry, space and restraint.
What stayed with me was not simply the formal similarity between the works. It was the feeling behind them.
There is something almost austere in Nasreen’s work. The lines repeat, disappear, return and gather themselves again. Her work seems quiet at first, but the longer you look, the more you sense an inner turbulence. The same is true of some of Lazzari’s works. Beneath the discipline and restraint there is a life being worked through.
A quote by Nasreen on the wall stopped me.
“Work alone into the depths of nature. Within the greatest chaos, truth is found.”
I kept thinking about it.
Perhaps this is what makes art so deeply personal. We often speak about discipline, practice, technique and finding one’s language. We rarely speak enough about what feeds that language. Grief. Loneliness. Isolation. The things we carry quietly. The confusion that sits beneath the surface while we continue to make.
I have always felt that grief, pain and loneliness can become fuel for expression. Not because suffering automatically makes better art, but because it can force us to look more closely at ourselves and at the world around us. Sometimes, when everything else falls away, making becomes a way of finding some kind of order within the chaos.
Standing in front of Nasreen’s work, I found that strangely comforting.
Even the greats struggled. They searched. They withdrew. They questioned. They wrestled with their own worlds and somehow turned that private turmoil into something that could speak to another person decades later.
That, for me, is one of the extraordinary things about art.
You may work alone.
But you are never entirely alone.