The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía with the collaboration of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

One of the most significant artists to emerge in post-Independence India, Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) created a body of work that demonstrates a singular and sustained engagement with abstraction. Her minimalist practice not only adds a rich layer to the history of South Asian art but also necessitates an expansion of the narratives of international modernism. The Met Breuer exhibition, the first museum retrospective of the artist's work in the United States, is an important part of the Met's initiative to explore and present the global scope of modern and contemporary art.

Mohamedi mainly worked with gestures of pencil and ink on paper, experimenting with organic forms, delicate grids, and dynamic, hard-edged lines. Her cosmopolitan outlook enabled her to draw upon a range of aesthetic sensibilities, from the poetry of Rilke and Camus, as well as Indian classical music, to the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier's Chandigarh.

Spanning Mohamedi's entire career and bringing together more than 130 paintings, drawings, photographs, and rarely seen diaries, the exhibition traces the conceptual complexity and visual subtlety of the artist's oeuvre.

In the history of Indian Modernism, Nasreen Mohamedi is a distinct figure who broke away from the mainstream art practice of the early decades of post-Independent India, choosing the less explored trajectory of the 'non-representational'. Without engaging in reconfiguring the world in images, Nasreen was drawn to 'space' and her art was inspired by both man-made environments, especially architecture, geometry as well as the underlying structures in nature. The optical, metaphysical and mystical overlapped in her quest for a non-objective, non-material world.

The artist’s journey was marked by rigours of self-discipline and self-restraint. Through acts of renunciation of figures, objects, narration, decoration and excess, she arrived at an interiorized vision articulated in a sparse aesthetics and frugal means of art making, using pencil and ink pen to plot a phenomenological experience and breathe life into her lines, that often remained restless and always at the edge to embrace a view to infinity.

This exhibition brings together an extensive body of work and intends to draw connections between Nasreen’s works from the early 1960s to the 80s, to highlight the singular vision that runs through the notes from her diaries, to her early paintings, collages, photographs and drawings.