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Lot Essay
As times and cultures converge, the citadels of purism explode. Traditional. and modern, private and public, the inside and outside continually telescope and reunite. The kaleidoscopic flux of images engages me to construe structures in the process of being created.
- Gulammohammed Sheikh, 1981
After spending three years at the Royal College of Art in London on a Commonwealth Scholarship in the 1960s, Gulammohammed Sheikh’s practice became firmly entrenched in a figurative-narrative tradition, focusing on the search for an indigenous vocabulary that reflected the diversity of human life and experiences in India. The layered, kaleidoscopic landscapes that populate his paintings, with their organic forms and vibrant colors, are informed by a consciousness of the surreal existing in the mundane, and a keen awareness of the extensive range of visual and textual cultures and traditions that has always informed creative pursuits in India and globally. These paintings challenge the notion of a monolithic culture or nation, and emphasize the multiplicity of perspectives and simultaneity of chronologies that shape each individual.
The artist’s large-format paintings, like the present lot, are as influenced by the Rajasthani miniature painting traditions he studied as they are by the work of Flemish and early Italian painters he admired, and the work of modern artists including René Magritte, Giorgio Morandi and Max Beckmann. In these polymorphic landscapes, Sheikh explored the possibility of recording multiple times and places in a single frame, creating “multiverses that are rooted in historical fact and fiction [...] He is also firmly rooted in the nature of multitude of narratives, where the characters and the physical attributes of a location rather than a framework indicate location. So a work is not wholly site specific [...] in as much as experience based, mingling with specifics related to memory, history, tales and folklore and a leveling of time” (R. Sawhney, A Floating Object, Mumbai, 2012, unpaginated).
As a disciple of multiplicity and a firm believer in cosmopolitanism, the early 1990s proved particularly wrenching with a new and powerful wave of sectarian politics washing over India, cresting in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the bomb blasts and bloody communal riots that followed in its wake. A lifelong resident of Gujarat, where the polarization and violence was exceptionally gruesome, Sheikh became increasingly invested in “Reclaiming the pluralist and heterodox inheritance of Indian tradition [...] Alongside many others, Sheikh devoted himself to the making of posters and banners for marches and rallies, simultaneously commencing a re-examination of the pluralist heritage of Indian devotional, spiritual and mystical traditions” (C. Sambrani, At Home in the World, the Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh, New Delhi, 2019, p 138).
This epic nightscape, which was painted over two years following Sheikh’s retirement from the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University in Baroda, plaintively voices his alarm, and disillusionment perhaps, in the aftermath of the atrocities he witnessed in the city, state and country. Titled How Can You Sleep Tonight?, after a line from a Hindi poem by the early twentieth century poet Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, this painting’s expansive vista is surmounted by a shadowy half-moon, under which several parallel narratives unfold, some solid and proximate, others more distant and ephemeral. Diminutive multi-armed deities and robed wanderers share the space with archers, gunmen, pleading figures on their knees and what appear to be a few winged angels. Pointed and domed structures dot the landscape, along with teetering stairways, dark doorways and a central clocktower, modelled after the one in Sheikh’s hometown, Surendranagar. At the base of the composition, a couple lies awake in bed, distressed perhaps by the scenes unfolding around them, asking themselves the same question posed by the artist in the title of this painting.
Sheikh brings these overlapping narratives alive with a nocturnal, dreamlike palette of blues and yellows, resembling a heat map whose highest pitch is at the bright heart of the composition. Like an intense conflagration, the heat from this central point seems to be radiating outward, soon to color and affect many more lives and landscapes. Describing this as a ‘thermal consciousness’, the artist noted, “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).
Shortly after he painted this monumental diptych, a physical format that notably also acknowledges difference and unity, Sheikh would formulate a considered response to the questions it raised based on the work of the 15th century bhakti poet Kabir, who disregarded organized religion and its rituals in favor of a personal, spiritual union with the divine.
- Gulammohammed Sheikh, 1981
After spending three years at the Royal College of Art in London on a Commonwealth Scholarship in the 1960s, Gulammohammed Sheikh’s practice became firmly entrenched in a figurative-narrative tradition, focusing on the search for an indigenous vocabulary that reflected the diversity of human life and experiences in India. The layered, kaleidoscopic landscapes that populate his paintings, with their organic forms and vibrant colors, are informed by a consciousness of the surreal existing in the mundane, and a keen awareness of the extensive range of visual and textual cultures and traditions that has always informed creative pursuits in India and globally. These paintings challenge the notion of a monolithic culture or nation, and emphasize the multiplicity of perspectives and simultaneity of chronologies that shape each individual.
The artist’s large-format paintings, like the present lot, are as influenced by the Rajasthani miniature painting traditions he studied as they are by the work of Flemish and early Italian painters he admired, and the work of modern artists including René Magritte, Giorgio Morandi and Max Beckmann. In these polymorphic landscapes, Sheikh explored the possibility of recording multiple times and places in a single frame, creating “multiverses that are rooted in historical fact and fiction [...] He is also firmly rooted in the nature of multitude of narratives, where the characters and the physical attributes of a location rather than a framework indicate location. So a work is not wholly site specific [...] in as much as experience based, mingling with specifics related to memory, history, tales and folklore and a leveling of time” (R. Sawhney, A Floating Object, Mumbai, 2012, unpaginated).
As a disciple of multiplicity and a firm believer in cosmopolitanism, the early 1990s proved particularly wrenching with a new and powerful wave of sectarian politics washing over India, cresting in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the bomb blasts and bloody communal riots that followed in its wake. A lifelong resident of Gujarat, where the polarization and violence was exceptionally gruesome, Sheikh became increasingly invested in “Reclaiming the pluralist and heterodox inheritance of Indian tradition [...] Alongside many others, Sheikh devoted himself to the making of posters and banners for marches and rallies, simultaneously commencing a re-examination of the pluralist heritage of Indian devotional, spiritual and mystical traditions” (C. Sambrani, At Home in the World, the Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh, New Delhi, 2019, p 138).
This epic nightscape, which was painted over two years following Sheikh’s retirement from the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University in Baroda, plaintively voices his alarm, and disillusionment perhaps, in the aftermath of the atrocities he witnessed in the city, state and country. Titled How Can You Sleep Tonight?, after a line from a Hindi poem by the early twentieth century poet Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, this painting’s expansive vista is surmounted by a shadowy half-moon, under which several parallel narratives unfold, some solid and proximate, others more distant and ephemeral. Diminutive multi-armed deities and robed wanderers share the space with archers, gunmen, pleading figures on their knees and what appear to be a few winged angels. Pointed and domed structures dot the landscape, along with teetering stairways, dark doorways and a central clocktower, modelled after the one in Sheikh’s hometown, Surendranagar. At the base of the composition, a couple lies awake in bed, distressed perhaps by the scenes unfolding around them, asking themselves the same question posed by the artist in the title of this painting.
Sheikh brings these overlapping narratives alive with a nocturnal, dreamlike palette of blues and yellows, resembling a heat map whose highest pitch is at the bright heart of the composition. Like an intense conflagration, the heat from this central point seems to be radiating outward, soon to color and affect many more lives and landscapes. Describing this as a ‘thermal consciousness’, the artist noted, “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).
Shortly after he painted this monumental diptych, a physical format that notably also acknowledges difference and unity, Sheikh would formulate a considered response to the questions it raised based on the work of the 15th century bhakti poet Kabir, who disregarded organized religion and its rituals in favor of a personal, spiritual union with the divine.