Language from Home Is a Foreign Place

Zarina lived in Bangkok, Delhi, Paris, Bonn, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Santa Cruz before settling in New York in 1976. Although she also works in sculpture and drawing, woodcuts have been of primary importance in her work over the last several decades. Each of the sheets in Home Is a Foreign Place bears an abstract image and a word printed in Urdu, the artist's mother tongue. The terms she chose, such as "threshold," "border," "country" and "door," paired with her minimal images, create a lexicon relating to the theme of home.

Credit: Acquired through the generosity of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis in honor of Edgar Wachenheim III