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Lot Essay
After three years at the Royal College of Art in London on a Commonwealth Scholarship in the 1960s, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s practice became firmly entrenched in the figurative-narrative tradition within Indian art, focusing on the search for an indigenous vocabulary that reflected the diversity of human life and experiences.
His early paintings like the present lot are deeply influenced by the Indian miniature painting traditions he encountered at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and by the mentors he found there including Robert Skelton and Stuart Carey Welch. In these fantastical townscapes, Sheikh explored the possibility of recording multiple geographies and chronologies in a single frame.
“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.” (Artist statement, N. Tuli, The Flamed Mosaic: Contemporary Indian Painting, 1997, p. 67)
Sheikh brought these overlapping narratives alive with an almost psychedelic palette of pinks and greens, also drawn from miniature painting. The artist explained, “I found I could feel colour through temperature. The levels at which colours are pitched in miniature painting are actually temperature. This thermal consciousness became central to my work.” (G. Ramnarayan, ‘Coming home to one’s world’, The Hindu, 20 April 2006)
His early paintings like the present lot are deeply influenced by the Indian miniature painting traditions he encountered at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and by the mentors he found there including Robert Skelton and Stuart Carey Welch. In these fantastical townscapes, Sheikh explored the possibility of recording multiple geographies and chronologies in a single frame.
“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.” (Artist statement, N. Tuli, The Flamed Mosaic: Contemporary Indian Painting, 1997, p. 67)
Sheikh brought these overlapping narratives alive with an almost psychedelic palette of pinks and greens, also drawn from miniature painting. The artist explained, “I found I could feel colour through temperature. The levels at which colours are pitched in miniature painting are actually temperature. This thermal consciousness became central to my work.” (G. Ramnarayan, ‘Coming home to one’s world’, The Hindu, 20 April 2006)