Zarina Hashmi’s prints and sculptures are as elegantly spare as they are deeply personal, each evoking some element of her long, rich, wayfaring life. They represent the borders she has crossed, the places she has lived, the techniques she has honed, the poetry she has loved, the discipline with which she works, and, above all, a long-standing relationship with her medium of choice: paper, the handmade sort, be it pressed into sheets or extracted raw from vats of pulp. She has pierced it with pinholes; embossed it with thread; sculpted it into geometric bas-reliefs; and imprinted it with maps, lines, shapes, Urdu script, and the dense, sinewy grain of unsanded planks of wood. The breadth of her output (which, on occasion, has incorporated bronze, steel, and other sculptural materials as well) will be on display in a long-overdue retrospective, “Zarina: Paper Like Skin,” opening January 25 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Few exhibition titles are as beautifully indicative of the art therein. But flesh is the perfect proxy for her work, which is coarse yet intimate, organic yet refined, inked with personal totems, and scarred like a life well lived.

Though she settled on Manhattan’s West Side some 35 years ago, Zarina (as she prefers to be called — a nod to her affiliation in the 1970s with the feminist movement in New York) is something of a nomad by nature. In a sense, she says, we all are: “We are supposed to travel — that is how we work. This whole idea of being so attached to one place…I can talk about home and I can talk about my hometown, but would I want to go and live there? No, because I carry it with me.”

Zarina was born in Aligarh, a Muslim enclave in northern India, in 1937, just 10 years before the country’s declaration of independence from Britain and partition from Pakistan. Her father was a history professor at the local university, and education was nothing short of gospel in her book-filled childhood home. “My father was a great reader and a great storyteller,” she says. “And my mother read me stories of old kings and poetry from different religious traditions in Urdu, her mother tongue.”

Family road trips to historic nearby destinations like Fatehpur Sikri, a 16th-century imperial complex, sparked Zarina’s interest in architecture (and certain elements of these structures — their latticed walls, for instance — remain references in her work today). But she settled on mathematics in college, hoping to work as an engineer. That, too, led her to art.

Zarina’s family stayed in Aligarh for more than a decade after partition, but they were forced to migrate to Pakistan in the late 1950s. By then Zarina was married and traveling extensively with her husband, a member of the Indian Foreign Service. The union gave her a freedom and mobility that many Indian women at the time did not have.

For 20 years the couple bounced between Europe and Asia, touching down in Thailand (where she made her first woodblock), then France (where she embraced New Wave film and existentialist literature), then Germany (where she saw art by Carl Andre, Robert Rauschenberg, and Joseph Beuys), with several sojourns in India in between.

Zarina made art throughout. She studied doggedly too. In Paris, she apprenticed with printmaker Stanley William Hayter. “He thought like a scientist, and we both had never gone to art school, so there was a bond,” Zarina says. “And he was a great teacher. He showed me that there are no shortcuts in prints. Like when you solve a problem in mathematics, you can’t jump a step because you’ll get caught.” She studied the craft at the Toshi Yoshida Studio in Tokyo as well.

Printmaking, specifically on handmade paper (of which there is a great tradition in India), appealed to Zarina not as a means of reproduction but as “a medium for creating,” well suited to her interests in math and science and conducive to her tendency toward simplicity in form. There’s a sculptural and almost performative element to it too. She has always hand-carved her own woodblocks and hand-pressed her own prints. Her early work smartly riffs on the technique itself, with inked and grainy planks of wood printed into collage-like compositions that manage to be both starkly representational and strikingly abstract.

Zarina’s husband passed away while they were still relatively young, after which she moved to New York, settling in the Chelsea live-work space that still serves as her studio and home. She was initially misunderstood. The Indian community in the city was fairly small at the time, and printmaking was a less-than-common artistic discipline. “When I came here in the 1970s people would ask me what I do,” she recalls. “If I said, ‘I’m an artist,’ they’d go, ‘Oh! Do you play the sitar?’ If I said I was a printmaker they thought I was painting textiles or something. So once I started getting teaching jobs, I would say, ‘I’m a teacher.’ And then they left me alone.”

Zarina threw herself into New York’s feminist community, though she says it didn’t always embrace her back. She curated shows at the feminist A.I.R. Gallery and taught at the New York Feminist Art Institute. She pressed on privately, too. And the strains of Minimalism and Conceptualism permeating the city’s art scene in the ’70s undoubtedly had an impact on her work. She even, for a time, abandoned ink entirely, instead scoring, piercing, folding, pressing, and sculpting her paper to suss out the compositional possibilities of these techniques. Her 1977 “Pin Drawings” are dense patches of sewing-needle pricks; other works bear ridges and indentations achieved by scratching at surfaces and embossing them with strands of thread.