Important Notice

Gulam Mohammed Sheikh has played a seminal role in shaping contemporary art in India, as an artist, poet, and educator. The pluralistic nature of the small town of Surendranagar in Saurashtra, northwestern Gujarat, where he was born in 1937, proved formative to his intellectual and artistic outlook. Though he came from a Muslim family, he also studied Hindu and Jain texts written in Gujarati and Hindi, Vedic and Upanishadic literature, and the... Gulam Mohammed Sheikh has played a seminal role in shaping contemporary art in India, as an artist, poet, and educator. The pluralistic nature of the small town of Surendranagar in Saurashtra, northwestern Gujarat, where he was born in 1937, proved formative to his intellectual and artistic outlook. Though he came from a Muslim family, he also studied Hindu and Jain texts written in Gujarati and Hindi, Vedic and Upanishadic literature, and the poetry of Kalidasa while still at school. He once remarked, “In a way, I learnt more about belief systems other than the one in which I was born.” (Chaitanya Sambrani, “Small Town Beginnings: Surendranagar 1937-55,” Chaitanya Sambrani ed., At Home in the World: The Art and Life of Gulammohamed Sheikh, New Delhi: Tulika Books in association with Vadehra Art Gallery, 2019, p. 98)

He enrolled at MS University, Baroda, in 1955, under the tutelage of N S Bendre, Sankho Chaudhri, and K G Subramanyan, and later joined as faculty in 1960. Here he was exposed to a wide range of pedagogic and artistic practices from across India, Europe, and America, which prompted a search for his own visual identity. Unlike many of his contemporaries who had moved to abstraction, Sheikh remained a figurative painter for most of his career. In 1962, he became part of Group 1890, an artists’ collective whose members included Jagdish Swaminathan, Jeram Patel, Jyoti Bhatt, and Ambadas though the group opposed both the idealism of the Bengal School and mannerism of European Modernism, “Sheikh and Swaminathan embarked on two quite distinct and occasionally opposing trajectories. Swaminathan pursued his opposition to historical fixity by becoming entirely ahistorical through a metaphysical embrace of the numinous, whereas Sheikh gravitated towards a trans-historical position seeking out crossovers between civilizational narratives and committing himself to an engagement with lived experience and phenomenological diversity.” (Sambrani, p. 112)

A year later, Sheikh moved to London for three years on a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art (RCA). It was during this brief period that he further cemented his visual idiom. He developed a palette of burnt oranges and reds, tempered with blues and greens, and replaced the impasto of his Baroda years with a smoother surface and clearly demarcated areas of colour. His passion for photography fuelled the beginnings of his method of stitching together a narrative out of disparate imagery, seen in the present lot. The Indian miniature paintings he saw at the Victoria & Albert Museum and British Museum, which “merged oneiric intensity with close observation and a fine commitment to naturalism” (Sambrani, p. 114), also influenced him for decades to come.

Many of Sheikh’s works, especially from the 1970s onwards, feature a careful layering of memory and fantasy, often in contemplation of the prevailing socio-political milieu. “...we are... led to encountering a riot of overlapping images, an ethereal blend of fantastical colours, mediums that extend from collage to painting to three-dimensional works, to a multitude of scenes and images, to scores of meanings, histories, events, memories and narratives.” (Arun Vadehra, “Foreword,” Sambrani, ed., p. 8) The present lot, a monumental canvas from 2015, features the imagery of an ark, which first appeared in the artist’s work in 2003 in response to the sectarian violence that had recently hit his home state of Gujarat. Set adrift on turbulent waters, with waves threatening to sink it at any moment, the ark speaks “of the covenant of wisdom and the refuge in the world that both seem utterly unattainable”. (Sambrani, p. 150) The form of the ark draws upon 18th-century master miniaturist Nainsukh’s A Boat Adrift on a River: Illustration to a Folk Legend (c. 1765 - 1775). On one end of the boat sits poet and Sufi mystic Kabir, who frequently appeared in the artist’s later works including the series Kahat Kabir, which he started in 1996. “For Sheikh, the challenge of fundamentalist politics needed a response that explicitly situated the heterodox and the sceptical as integral aspects of Indian tradition. In Kabir he found a kindred voice that...spoke as part of a vital critical tradition in Indian philosophy and poetry. Kabir’s firm belief in the ability of the bhakta to achieve transcendental union with the formless divine went hand-in-hand with a sceptical, questioning and caustic attitude towards ritual observance officiated by priesthood...” (Sambrani, p. 139) At the other end of the ark sits a crouched figure, perhaps symbolising man’s baser instincts. Between the two figures is the bluish expanse of a water body filled with iconography referencing Indian, Western, and Oriental traditions, including the goddess Kali, a group of Eastern mystics, a temple, and Srinagar’s Hazratbal shrine, together alluding to Sheikh’s sustained interest in cross-cultural syncretism in Indian culture.

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