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拍品专文
After completing a degree in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of M.S. University in Baroda, Gulammohammed Sheikh spent three years at the Royal College of Art in London on a Commonwealth Scholarship. It was during his third year in London that he had a breakthrough in his work. “Since his college had direct access to the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sheikh would often stop before the Kota miniatures on his way to the canteen. Delighted with the Indian student who was reminded of the painter Rousseau by the magical, almost surrealistic quality of Kota miniatures, scholar Robert Skelton put him in touch with the percipient Stewart Cary Welch. Recalls Sheikh, ‘Here were dark trees entwined, some under a moon. Tigers camouflaged, so were the hunters. I felt they're not on their own. I'm with them. What reaches out to me from these paintings after 200-300 years? Was it possible to live in multiple spaces and times? Could I get this into my work?’ Back in India, Sheikh had two exhibitions of sudden, unexpected, miraculous-seeming landscape changes seen on bus or train wanderings. ‘I painted trees, land, some erotic work also. 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).
With these early works, Sheikh’s practice began to focus on the search for an indigenous vocabulary that reflected the diversity of human life and art and the mobility and overlapping nature of different artistic traditions. “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 , 1997, p. 67).
It was during this period that Sheikh began using the motif of the tree in his work to represent a “transcendent aspiration” to explore multiple, intersecting genres and worlds, while remaining rooted in his own. Paintings like Portrait of a Tree, painted in 1975, are infused with a sense of the fantastical, emphasized through his use of a vivid palette to depict vistas and narratives. Here, “The tree stood for a subjectivity rooted in the local, while always containing in its reflection the possibility of traversal into other realms. Just as its branches and leaves were rendered meticulously, so were its roots traced down to their extremities, probing the extent to which this anchorage underpinned its visible verticality” (C. Sambrani, At Home in the World, the Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh, New Delhi, 2019, p. 127).
As Geeta Kapur noted, in paintings like the present lot, “The sites [Sheikh] presents are saturated with the mid-day heat of the Indian plains. The symbols often derive from these sites. A lush summer tree, the most frequently recurring subject of his paintings, becomes at once a hallowed presence, a numen, and a traditional life-symbol [...] It is particularly interesting in the Indian context, that for what is essentially a symbolic content, Sheikh has chosen a pictorial content that one would, with some qualifications, call realistic. On the basis of his intense admiration for the Moghul miniatures he is attempting to derive a figural style which, if it fulfills its promise, should change a great many assumptions currently fashionable in Indian art” (G. Kapur, “Gulam Sheikh”, Artrends, A Contemporary Art Bulletin, Vol. XI, Chennai 1976, p. 3).
With these early works, Sheikh’s practice began to focus on the search for an indigenous vocabulary that reflected the diversity of human life and art and the mobility and overlapping nature of different artistic traditions. “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 , 1997, p. 67).
It was during this period that Sheikh began using the motif of the tree in his work to represent a “transcendent aspiration” to explore multiple, intersecting genres and worlds, while remaining rooted in his own. Paintings like Portrait of a Tree, painted in 1975, are infused with a sense of the fantastical, emphasized through his use of a vivid palette to depict vistas and narratives. Here, “The tree stood for a subjectivity rooted in the local, while always containing in its reflection the possibility of traversal into other realms. Just as its branches and leaves were rendered meticulously, so were its roots traced down to their extremities, probing the extent to which this anchorage underpinned its visible verticality” (C. Sambrani, At Home in the World, the Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh, New Delhi, 2019, p. 127).
As Geeta Kapur noted, in paintings like the present lot, “The sites [Sheikh] presents are saturated with the mid-day heat of the Indian plains. The symbols often derive from these sites. A lush summer tree, the most frequently recurring subject of his paintings, becomes at once a hallowed presence, a numen, and a traditional life-symbol [...] It is particularly interesting in the Indian context, that for what is essentially a symbolic content, Sheikh has chosen a pictorial content that one would, with some qualifications, call realistic. On the basis of his intense admiration for the Moghul miniatures he is attempting to derive a figural style which, if it fulfills its promise, should change a great many assumptions currently fashionable in Indian art” (G. Kapur, “Gulam Sheikh”, Artrends, A Contemporary Art Bulletin, Vol. XI, Chennai 1976, p. 3).