GULAM MOHAMMED SHEIKH (B. 1937)

Gulam Mohammed Sheikh's works are firmly entrenched in the figurative-narrative tradition within Indian art. Sheikh concerns himself with the search for an indigenous art practice that reflects the diversity of human life and art. "In art, painting came in the company of poetry, overlapping and yet independent of each other. Images came from many times, each flowing into the other. Some came from life lived, others from a feeling of belonging to a world of other times, sometimes from painting, sometimes from literature, and often from nowhere, emerging simultaneously through jottings, drawings, and writings. The multiplicity and simultaneity of these worlds filled me with a sense of belonging to them all. All attempts to define the experience in singular terms have left me with a feeling of unease and restlessness. Absence of rejected worlds has haunted me throughout." (Artist Statement, N. Tuli, The Flamed Mosaic: Contemporary Indian Painting, Ahmedabad, 1997, p. 67)

Sheikh's canvases are infused with a sense of the fantastical, emphasized through his use of a bright, almost psychedelic color scheme to depict separate yet interrelated narratives. According to Sheikh "there is no difference in what you call real and what is not real. You cannot extricate one from the other, it is simultaneous, the process is continuous, in that way times collide, spaces collide." (Artist Statement, N. Tuli, The Flamed Mosaic: Contemporary Indian Painting, Ahmedabad, 1997, p. 67)


This work belongs to a series of six commissioned for the Times of India Group Headquarters in New Delhi.