This duo show brought two eminent female artists into dialogue with each other. Superficially, there seemed to be little connecting their practices, but scratching the surface of their new works revealed that grief lay at the heart of both artists’ contributions to the exhibition. The show marked Norma Abbas’s first exhibition in four years, following a deeply personal loss. The new mixed-media paintings presented in Two Women sprang from the unfathomable well of private loss and memory, resulting in some of her most personal works to date. Nirmala Dutt debuted select pieces from her series Great Leap Forward, which examined the wrenching changes that accompanied Malaysia’s rapid development in the 1990s, along with a group of abstract paintings of the female form titled Woman.