Important Notice

In a 2016 lecture titled "Memory, Dreams, Desire, Statues and Ghosts," Gulammohammed Sheikh speaks eloquently of his journeys through "home, living cities and cities of imagination... which collapse into each other [so that] something else might emerge." He shows slides of his hometown, Surendranagar in Gujarat, recalling a clock tower and the horses and tongas on its dusty streets. In other cities like Baroda, he remembers mosques and... In a 2016 lecture titled "Memory, Dreams, Desire, Statues and Ghosts," Gulammohammed Sheikh speaks eloquently of his journeys through "home, living cities and cities of imagination... which collapse into each other [so that] something else might emerge." He shows slides of his hometown, Surendranagar in Gujarat, recalling a clock tower and the horses and tongas on its dusty streets. In other cities like Baroda, he remembers mosques and other built structures. The present lot, titled Recurring Image which he painted in 1962, is an early work which contains the beginnings of notions of remembered places and memories that he has spent a lifetime exploring.

While Sheikh drew inspiration from several sources, including Persian, Mughal and Pahar miniatures, and even European Renaissance art, his work retains an impression of storytelling. Drawing from the narrative of personal memories and histories, fragments that combine the real with the imagined, Sheikh's canvases are imbued with a sense of magical realism, as seen in the present lot. In a correspondence with Saffronart, Sheikh explained the multiple cities and memories layered in this work, as being "conceived and painted without any external assistance."

In his early years, he painted many "suffering, struggling tonga horses of Surendranagar," where he was born. (The artist quoted in Gowri Ramnarayan, "Coming home to one's world," The Hindu, 30 April 2006, online) The equine motif recurs in the foreground in the present lot, with the shadowy presence of two horses. "Most of the horses I painted in the early years of my career were white in colour, but not because the horses I saw in my home town were all white. It was a painterly decision. They were not drawn in the likeness of the horses (on the tonga) I encountered. This horse in black here is also part of a painterly decision," he said in a correspondence with Saffronart. Sheikh expounded on the painting by picking out a quote from his autobiographical essay, Among Many Cultures and Times: "In the search for a singular image, I devised (initially under the influence of M.F. Husain) a whinnying white horse in chase or isolation, perched on the horizon between dark expanses of earth and sky, harnessed to a tonga or, more often, free of associations of specific time and place."

Sheikh has written and spoken extensively about multiple memories and layering in his art. His work is informed by "...a consciousness of the surreal in the seemingly mundane.... Though the autobiographical reference has been an important part of his practice, Sheikh has found it possible to reach for reflections on the historical and the civilizational through the device of the autobiography. Musings on place, on the cultural environment of the individual are of importance, to him; the physical and the transcendental meet in his work." (contemporaryindianart.com, online)

Soon after Sheikh painted Recurring Image, he became a member of Group 1890, a short- lived collective founded by J Swaminathan. In 1963, they held their first and only group exhibition, with a manifesto which, above all, held the creative act of painting superior to the work of art itself. According to them, a work of art was "unique and sufficient unto itself, palpable in its reality and generating its own life." (Critical Collective, online)The present lot can be interpreted through the lens of this manifesto, with Sheikh's "inquiry into the city, the self" reflected in the "imagined, reimagined, recreated" image which is valuable as much for its physicality as for the journey which led to its creation.

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