Gallery Sumukha, at Wilson Garden, Bengaluru, is currently hosting a retrospective of prints by the artist Gulammohammed Sheikh. While the first part, titled “Gulammohammed Sheikh: Graphic Prints”, ended on July 27 (from June 29), the second part, titled “Mind Prints: Digital Works”, is on until September 14 (from August 17). The exhibition is curated by the artist Pushpamala N.
The selection from Sheikh’s more than six decades-old oeuvre follows various trajectories of being and becoming an artist. It chronicles his life, work, and times as well his idea of India. As a retrospective that showcases prints from different periods of his life in chronological order, the exhibition records the shifts not just in Sheikh’s oeuvre but also in the art and craft of printmaking in India, with the new tools leading to various technical and mediatic transformations for all artists.
In the case of Sheikh, we witness subtle and profound aesthetic and formal shifts—in the imagery, colour palette, tones and textures, compositional strategies, lines and strokes, and cuts and slashes that went into the making of these prints. The images serve as a timeline of Sheikh’s response to the events he has lived through.
Sheikh working in the studio of Chhaap, a non-profit founded on a cooperative basis in 1999 for artists and printmakers. | Photo Credit: Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sumukha.
Sheikh’s printmaking journey began with him joining the Faculty of Fine Arts in Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1955. This period was marked by black-and-white prints, made using a single colour, of still life and generic human figures, linocuts printed on cloth, and lithographs. A major shift in Sheikh’s approach and technique happened when he was invited to a printmaking workshop organised by the Smithsonian Institution in Delhi, under the leadership of the artist Paul Lingren, in which more than 100 artists from all over India participated. The workshop introduced him to the technique of aquatint. In later decades, Sheikh went on to experiment with colour and techniques like silkscreen printing. The ongoing exhibition shows him exploring the potential of digital technology in recent years.
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Many of the prints on show were made at various iconic workshops, in the company of illustrious artists, and they have travelled over India and the world. Sheikh also contributed illustrations for avant-garde publications.
Opening doors
Sheikh draws his imageries from different sources, literary texts, and spiritual traditions to envision the contemporary and to engage with it critically. The “voices” he listens to and evokes, the figures he invokes and incites, the abstractions he “draws” from—all have a deep, syncretic resonance. Take, for example, the silkscreen print titled Speaking Tree (circa 1980). It is inspired by a 13th century Persian text, Sikandarnama, a story about Sikandar/Alexander encountering on his way to India a speaking tree called Waq Waq, which speaks in different tongues and contains animal, human, and bird heads on its branches.
Untitled, wood cut, circa 1970. | Photo Credit: Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sumukha.
Compositionally, the print is a simple image in the “tree of life” tradition—while the branching tree is placed against a blue background, the middle of the painting, with the tree trunk, is painted bright yellow, with the tree spreading its branches horizontally and vertically across the blue and yellow planes. If the leaves and branches are black in the blue background, they turn white within the yellow rectangle at the centre. The yellowed part looks like a door opening out to a world beyond.
In another work, Mother India (1990), a digital collage print on silkscreen, an image of the villain Gabbar Singh from Sholay is juxtaposed with that of the assassin of the Christian missionary Graham Staines. It is a deadly juxtaposition that tells us how the boundaries between fiction and fact, memory and history, nightmare and reality have merged in our times.
“Sheikh draws his imageries from different sources, literary texts, and spiritual traditions to envision the contemporary and to engage with it critically.”
Sheikh’s images tend to speak in different tongues, inviting us into different temporalities, spectral spaces, and narrative contexts, with each one opening into and conversing with the others. Verses from the Upanishads, quotes from ancient Persian texts, mythological/epical figures like Mayamriga and Aswatthama, dohas of Kabir, maps, cityscapes, stills from films—all mix and converse freely here, like incantations or warnings, beacons, or forebodings.
Expelled Angel, silkscreen, circa 1990. | Photo Credit: Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sumukha.
Figures are drawn from everyday life and surroundings too—like horses, which, the artist says, “are not the timeless horses of Husain’s, but common tonga horses… the solitary animal wandering around the city or in woods as a personal leitmotif denoting the self as a struggling young artist” (from the text accompanying the prints).
Still Life with Landscape (Days of the Dagger), etching-aquatint, final version, brown tint, circa 1993. | Photo Credit: Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sumukha.
Recording history
The works also take us on a journey of the artist’s past and creative lives: there are images from his childhood, the house he lived in, the art school where he honed his skills, the cityscapes that moulded him as an artist. In a striking image, we see a foetus in a cot bracketed by figures of the artist’s mother and father. It is a haunting image, one that speaks about memories and premonitions of a different kind; it is about the self that is yet to be, oneself as a potential, and oneself as the progenitor of one’s dream and hope. It puts temporal sense on hold, presenting biography and history as something in the making. Sheikh is one artist who has lived through post-Independence India, chronicling it meticulously: right from the communal riots of 1968-69 in Gujarat, through the dark days of Emergency, the violence that followed the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, the Gujarat carnage of 2002, to the outbreaks of communal tension in recent years. All these traumatic incidents leave scars in Sheikh’s body of work.
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To look at the prints of Gulammohammed Sheikh is to go on a virtual journey through various histories: of the artist and his oeuvre, of the changing technologies of printmaking, and of certain persistent motifs and concerns that haunt Sheikh and our times.
C.S. Venkiteswaran is a film critic and documentary filmmaker based in Kochi.
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