‘Of Worlds Within Worlds’: Showing Gulammohammed Sheikh's lifetime of brilliance
Summary
Gulammohammed Sheikh’s retrospective at KNMA distils a lifetime’s mastery over art and its healing powers
Inside the dimly lit interiors of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Delhi, 87-year-old Gulammohammed Sheikh leads a group of art enthusiasts on a walkthrough of his latest exhibition, Of Worlds Within Worlds. It’s a chilly morning in early February, but this grand retrospective of a lifetime’s brilliance runs till the end of June, which is just as well. To absorb the full magnificence of the show, you’ll probably want to return to KNMA multiple times. “Early on, I decided I’d bring as many worlds as possible into my work," Sheikh says, as we pause before Returning Home After a Long Absence, a magisterial oil on canvas he had made between 1969-73. It’s a deeply moving, autobiographical work, with a portrait of his mother against the backdrop of the mohalla in Surendranagar, where Sheikh grew up, in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat. She is waiting for her son to return home after his finishing his studies abroad.
But the appeal of the painting extends beyond the personal theme. Rather, it is sprinkled over the curious assembly of details coming together in a marvellous collage of mythic, art-historical, realist and dream-like motifs, creating a plane of existence in which the ancient past and the present moment coexist, even become one and the same. On the top is a depiction of the Prophet on his winged horse Buraq, drawn from a typical Persian-style painting. He is pursued by a flock of angels in Asian attire, though the composition harks back to the presence of cherubs on the edges of neoclassical European art. There is also a chinar tree, from the world of Mughal miniatures, overlooking a cluster of houses. The dome of an azure mosque rises among the foliage, all conjured out of vivid blocks of colour.
Stare at it long enough, and the scene starts looking like a dreamscape, painted by a modernist artist like Rene Magritte, in collaboration with colleagues from different times and geographies. It is this strategy of using “quotations" from diverse sources—from European Old Masters to the scroll painters of Bengal and kaavadiyas of Rajasthan— that lends a unique intellectual frisson to Sheikh’s work.
Great art emerges out of the interplay of influences, by bringing the legacy of the past to bear upon the urgency of the present. Hidden in the poetic lines of Rabindranath Tagore is the cadence of Kalidasa, while the devotional hymns of the Bhakti poets ring through his songs. But ultimately, it is Tagore’s singular genius that gives his work the aura of profound originality. So it is with Sheikh.
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INNER DIALOGUES
In Sheikh’s cross-referencing and nod to tradition, there is an urge to transcend the laws of nature, break through the barriers of time and space, to seek companionship with figures like Kabir and M.K. Gandhi, even as the artist remains in thrall to the upheavals of his time. As Roobina Karode, the curatorial mind behind the show, puts it, Sheikh’s works are “not designed in linear time." So, his level of intellectual ingenuity demands a radical openness from the viewer, too.
Sheikh was trained at M.S. University in Baroda (now Vadodara) by artist K.G. Subramanyan, among others, known as the mentor of a generation of painters. Later, he would go on to study in England and Italy. But be it at home or abroad, he heard the same refrain from his teachers: we can teach you technique, but we can’t tell you what to do with it. On graduating, Sheikh had a show at Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai, inaugurated by M.F. Husain, whose paintings of horses struck a had chord with him. But even early on, he knew his path clearly. “The horses I painted came from the ones that pulled the tonga in my home city, unlike the regal creatures of Husain, full of vitality," Sheikh says.
Some of these early works, including several never-before-seen gouaches, are on display at KNMA. Over the years, Sheikh’s exchanges with senior artists, either contemporaries or from another era, would intensify, leading to art that is ambitious, both in terms of scale and conception. The arrangement of his works inside the gallery mimics this fluidity, as each room flows into another—worlds opening out to other worlds—in an allusion to the title of the show.
The unfolding is not chronological but rather follows a logic of spiritual affinity, the linkages are more thematic than stylistic. Often, the artist seems to be in an internal dialogue with his shifting selves, as times change and his sensibility evolves. Speechless City (1975) and Speaking Street (1981), both cityscapes painted only a few years apart, appear like doppelgangers. The former was a response to the muzzling of free speech during the Emergency, where only dogs and crows are left in a ghost town. In this haunting work, Sheikh mixed Italian-style perspective on the top, while focusing on traditional horizontal representation below, complicating the grammar of his visual idiom. In contrast, he returns to the cacophony of his childhood neighbourhood in Speaking Street, where angels descend from the heavens to lift him up from the roof of the local mosque, while life flows down below. Sheikh removes walls, turning the viewer into a voyeur, giving them slices of domestic drama—violence, love, solitude, conviviality.
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Each vignette has its own story, making it easy to miss the forest for the trees. “I wanted to translate the idea of a journey into a painting," Sheikh says. “So, I created a series of images flowing into one another, playing with proximity and distance." The viewer, too, is compelled to zoom in and out, by physically moving around a painting to grasp it in its totality.
BURNT AND BROKEN
Despite its cerebral focus, Sheikh’s art rests on an abiding faith in humanism. Having spent most of his life in Gujarat, he stands witness to many episodes of communal riots that have torn through the state. In some of his most powerful paintings, Ahmedabad:The City that Gandhi Left Behind (2015-16) for instance, the spiritual crisis of living through such turmoils is captured with unsparing bleakness. Unlike the light touches in the paintings from the 1970s and 1980s (there is one in which former Miss World Reita Faria makes an appearance), a dark cloud hovers over this magisterial canvas. The city plunged into fear, while an autorickshaw burns in the middle, like a heart on fire. People from different social groups gather to around a fire in another panorama—an act of self-preservation that also carrying a whiff of menace, like the lingering smell of sulphur after a match is lit.
Rooted in his belief in the cathartic power of art, Sheikh reframes the German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s lines. “There will be paintings about the dark times," he says, leading the rapt audience into the kaavads, inspired by the accordion-like structures used by storytellers in Rajasthan. He urges each person to step inside the room-like enclosures, painted all over with dense imagery, and look up at the canopy, where earth, water and sky become one. And just like that, for a fleeting moment, you feel soothed in the embrace of great art.
Of Worlds Within Worlds is on at KNMA, Delhi, till 30 June.
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