The work

Best known as a printmaker, Zarina preferred to carve a line rather than draw it—to gouge a surface instead of building one up. She worked across woodcut, intaglio, lithography, and screenprint, often using a portfolio—such as Home is a Foreign Place—so that a place, word, or idea could gather meaning through repetition.

Architecture, Urdu, remembered homes, contested borders, and damaged geographies recur throughout works including These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness, Countries, and Dividing Line. Beyond printmaking, she punctured, scratched, wove, folded, and sewed paper, and made sculptures in bronze, aluminum, steel, wood, tin, and paper pulp.