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Lot 18

 

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Gulammohammed Sheikh's works on canvas from the 1980s and 90s are a riot of colours; frames within which various characters and strands of narratives run into each other, generating new myths and fables, before continuing on their respective journeys.

Speaking of these monumental canvases, which teem with life and activity, the artist explains his vision and motivations, "It is not narrative alone that engages me. My interest…is in... Gulammohammed Sheikh's works on canvas from the 1980s and 90s are a riot of colours; frames within which various characters and strands of narratives run into each other, generating new myths and fables, before continuing on their respective journeys.

Speaking of these monumental canvases, which teem with life and activity, the artist explains his vision and motivations, "It is not narrative alone that engages me. My interest…is in exploring multiplicities and simultaneity. These preoccupy me because of my interest in incorporating quotations from different sources. I am equally interested in understanding how diverse narratives were portrayed simultaneously in Ajanta, or in Rajasthani or Pahadi paintings. The Ajanta caves have several stories on a single wall without distinguishing divides whereas in Rajasthani painting several events of a story are simultaneously narrated within a single ‘frame'…My interest in these forms triggered the exploration of multiple portrayals, without a linear sequentiality, with an intrinsic order that would hold it all together. So if you worked within a frame, as I did, the question was how to break it, and bring multiple stories within its borders with several entries and exits, to enable the viewer to enter from one story into the other; either from the point he chose or the points that the painting would suggest. I was also keen to explore ‘continuous narration' where you could construct not necessarily a story, but a situation in which the image of the principal character could move from one story to another, one situation to another. This allowed me to construe fables" (Suman Gopinath, "In Conversation with Gulammohammed Sheikh", Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany, 2008, p. 45).

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