All Doors Lead to the Gulam Sheikh Retrospective

Delhi was awash with culture earlier this month when the 16th annual India Art Fair brought international visitors, collectors and many others to the capital, shortly after the Jaipur Literature Festival had attracted even larger local and international crowds to the pink city just three or four hours away on a splendid new highway.

There were many individual exhibitions around Delhi during the fair with one drawing most attention – a spectacular retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art of the 88-year-old veteran artist Gulammohammed (GM) Sheikh with more than 190 works painted over six decades.

The fair was a success with a record 120 exhibitors including 15 international galleries, strong sales that reflected the buoyancy of the market, and such large crowds that entry was blocked for a time on two of the four days.

Galleries like India’s Nature Morte and Vadehra did well selling the majority of their works within 24 hours. From abroad, David Zwirner, Lisson Gallery, Galleria Continua and Aicon said they were happy, though Lisson and Continua failed to sell two of Anish Kapoor’s archetypal colourful conclave mirror sculptures. According to the fair organisers, sales for individual works ranged up to $450,000 reported by Zwirner.

‘Of worlds within worlds’

Aptly titled Of worlds within worlds, the KNMA exhibition reflects Gulammohammed Sheikh’s wider interests as an art historian and a poet with highly colourful complex works. Sheikh doesn’t paint basic figuratives, abstracts or landscapes but merges all styles, drawing thoughts and experiences from memories of his own life mixed with his immediate surroundings, plus current issues and wider themes that include Mahatma Gandhi, the mystic poet Kabir and the Mahabharat Hindu epic.

“You have to enter his paintings through many doors,” his wife Nilima Sheikh, who is also a famous artist, told me. “Yes, his concepts are complicated”.

I had just walked with Gulammohammed round the exhibition and heard about his strict Muslim family upbringing in a Gujarati village and his entry into a “whole new world” of liberal attitudes at the state’s Baroda art school, and then in 1966 at London’s Royal College of Art. In an emotional speech at the exhibition opening, he said that the family didn’t understand but tolerated his new life, adding, in the context of his works, that “the past is always in the present”.

I asked him about a massive painting (above) called Kaarawaan (journey) that dominates the exhibition entrance with a stunning flash of colour – a 257in long and 80in high acrylic on canvas with 2019-2023 as the date. He explained that sometimes he moves on without completing works. “If a painting is not resolved, I come back to it later,” he says. “No painting is ever complete, there is always another one waiting in the wings”.

Kaarawaan is his latest major work. It highlights factors in his life with trees, urban areas and famous artists, who he says have been part of his journey, all together in a massive ark. “There is a time in the life of everyone when you think ‘let me take it all with me and move on’,“ he said. He borrowed the idea of the ark-like boat from 18th century folklore ‘A Boat Adrift’, a work by his favourite painter, the famous Indian miniaturist Nainsukh.

“I do respond to contemporary events like the [India’s 1995] Emergency, the rise of communalism etc.,” he says. One of the most dramatic examples is City for Sale (above) painted in 1981-84 when he was appalled by the horror of riots that arose in Baroda over a controversial film.  Another work deals with the demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya in northern India. “The intention is to make the viewer contemplate on the events to find ways of dealing with them.”

He had been “looking at my own life, painting my own story” when he began one of his famous works (below on the right) called Returning Home after a Long Absence (1969-73) that graphically demonstrates his mixed themes. He says it had “earlier versions”, but eventually showed a collage of houses where the family lived, a mosque, an image of the Prophet drawn from Persian painting in the night sky, a tree from a Mughal miniature, and his mother added in the foreground.

Nilima Sheikh told me about her husband’s paintings’ “many doors” when we met to talk about her friend and fellow artist, Arpita Singh, whose first UK solo show, Remembering,opens at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park next month.

The Sheikhs are often grouped with their friend Bhupen Khakhar, India’s most well-known gay artist who had a big exhibition in London’s Tata Modern in 2016. All three studied at the Baroda (Gujarat) art school in the 1960s, where Sheikh also taught.

The group developed narrative-oriented and often deeply personal art that broke away from the older and better-known Bombay-based Progressives such as M.F.Husain, Tyeb Mehta, S.H.Raza, and F.N.Souza who were inspired by modern European art. They also avoided the the Bengal school’s traditional Indian approach.

Arpita Singh, who studied in Delhi, had links with Baroda. They were all appropriately included in the London Barbican’s 1975-1998 exhibition late last year that aimed to shift the focus of collectors, auction houses and a wider audience on from the Progressives, who for years have dominated public attention and auctions with top prices rising over $6m.

Sheikh’s highest auction price is $2.5m paid for Ark: Kashmir in 2023 at Saffronart in Mumbai. Bhupen Khakhar’s explicit Two Men in Benares sold for a personal record of $3,2m  at Sotheby’s London in 2019.

Unlike some artists, Sheikh does not produce a continuous stream of paintings. I asked him what he is painting now and he vaguely answered that he was doing “some drawing”, which his wife said probably means he is probably focusing on his writing.

Illustrating the massive range of his activity, the KNMA exhibition includes gouaches, pen and ink drawings, graphic prints, digital collages, accordion books (unfolding sheets of paper), plus poems, photographs and sculptures. There were none of his large works for sale at the art fair after sell-out Delhi and Mumbai exhibitions last year, though Gallery Sumukha had examples of his printmaking practice from 1950s.

The exhibition continues till June 30 at the south Delhi museum which Kiran Nadar has built and expanded since 2010. Over the years, she has become India’s most important and influential collector of modern and contemporary South Asian art, playing a pace-making role at major auctions and staging regular significant shows of leading artists and other events.

Completing the scene is the fifth edition of Jaipur’s Sculpture Park organised by Peter Nagy of Nature Morte at Amer on the city’s outskirts. It is open till October 15, laid out this year in Jaigarh Fort, which is believed to have been a medieval prison before it became an ammunition storehouse. Located moistly in rooms off a central courtyard, there are more than 25 sculptures by 16 artists using bronze, stainless steel, ceramics, fibres and other materials.

This article first appeared on the author’s blog Riding With Elephants.