Nasreen Mohamedi — Karachi, Undivided India | Present-day Pakistan.

In 2003, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Early Drawing (1959), offered in the Fn-Fn: Figurative Non-Figurative Narration: Auctions of Indian Modern & Contemporary Paintings & Books by Osian's, which concluded on 27 November 2003 at Mumbai, achieving a sale price of ₹77,000 ($1,678). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

In 2016, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1960), offered in the Evening Sale: Live Auction by Saffronart, which concluded on 08 September 2016 at New Delhi, achieving a sale price of ₹2,40,00,000 ($361,183). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

Nasreen’s drawings raise the question of perspective in several different ways. Perspective as a ubiquitous premise of thought; and the vanishing point as the flip-face of imagist art that is mostly representational and anthropomorphic and full of object presence, blocking the horizon by foregrounded bodies.

In 2020, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1963), offered in the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art Online by Sotheby's, which concluded on 16 March 2020 at New York, achieving a sale price of ₹3,24,94,131.25 ($437,500). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

In 2009, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1965), offered in the South Asian Modern & Contemporary Art by Christie's, which concluded on 10 June 2009 at London, achieving a sale price of ₹13,55,739 ($28,681). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

In 2024, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1969), offered in the Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art by Sotheby's, which concluded on 18 March 2024 at New York, achieving a sale price of ₹4,00,11,304.28 ($482,600). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

In 2014, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1971), offered in the The India Sale by Christie's, which concluded on 11 December 2014 at Mumbai, achieving a sale price of ₹80,25,000 ($129,007.06). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

In 2014, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1975), offered in the Live Auction: Modern Indian Art by Saffronart, which concluded on 04 September 2014 at New Delhi, achieving a sale price of ₹45,60,000 ($75,429.25). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

In 2015, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1975), offered in the The India Sale by Christie's, which concluded on 15 December 2015 at Mumbai, achieving a sale price of ₹1,82,25,000 ($271,838.43). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

In 2014, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1979), offered in the The India Sale by Christie's, which concluded on 11 December 2014 at Mumbai, achieving a sale price of ₹59,85,000 ($96,212.74). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

In 2015, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Untitled (1985), offered in the Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art by Sotheby's, which concluded on 06 October 2015 at London, achieving a sale price of ₹92,86,312.5 ($142,012.52). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

Towards the end of the 1970s, the spatial disposition of Nasreen’s drawings changes. Proximate and spaced sets of parallel lines turn into shadow-planes. From translucent to pitch-black, these shapes of varying densities, suspended on a white surface, are sometimes sliced by light shafts charged with energy. However dense, these planar forms are not brushed in as solids but built up with a mass of lines...

At times an entire fgirder is lifted off the ground and held in place. Nasreen counts it as an achievement - leaving the stability of the grid, handling so dynamic an element as the diagonal, and creating a perspectival distortion on the flat surface that reads like an acutely anamorphic horizon suspended in space...

To end the reading of diagonals, take the figures of the chevron, triangle, and vector. Nasreen has a special interest in demonstrating her virtuoso grasp of such steep forms. If the geometry of the grid aims to bringa subtractive economy to graphic structures, lines that converge create, in geometric terms, a chevron: wing, arrow, wedge. Completed, the chevron becomes a triangle. From the late 1970s, she makes triangles that are so elongated as to be anamorphic, proposing that they be disambiguated by some other, impossible angle of perception if we want to get the shape in place...

A hypothetical turnaround tests her ambivalent sense of equilibrium. I imagine she would be compelled by Zeno’s pareadox, which hypothesizes that an arrow shot from a quiver is motionless and at rest in a count of time based on instants. This “possibility” complicates the idea of temporality, of transience, traverse, duration. And it posits, within the very terms of the arrow’s assumed trajectory, illusory stillness. Nasreen would be happy to blur the boundary between perceived and experienced time, to both engage and undermine the concept of humanly engineered movement with a paradox transposed from philosophy to aesthetics.

In 2017, an artwork by Nasreen Mohamedi was featured on the cover of Osians: Indian Antiquities Modern Contemporary Fine Arts & Books (April 2017, Mumbai), marking a documented highlight in the artist's public and auction market visibility.