Zubeida Agha is counted among the women artists who began building a counternarrative of abstraction in the post-war decades. Composition (1988) was made towards the end of Agha’s career. Unlike her earlier works that featured surreal landscapes and still bore narrative features, it is an example of pure geometric abstraction. An assemblage of asymmetric shapes modelled in black, yellow, and different shades of red – evocative of a three- dimensional arrangement – converges at the centre of the work. These emphasise the modular aspect of this central element made of triangles and other diagonal line segments. Contrary to expectations, there is no sharp edge; lines are deliberately uneven. Some seem abbreviated and almost distorted. The result is magnetic, but also contained in its partial use of the surface. Obstructed by a brown band that runs across the foreground, the composition eschews pictorial resolution. It is a study in form and the possibilities it holds.
This is the first time the work of Zubeida Agha is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Devika Singh
