EVENING SALE | LIVE, NEW DELHI (8 SEPTEMBER 2016)

54-55 / 256

54 Saffronart | Evening Sale
“When I think of the city, it begins with home.”
 G M SHEIKH
55
Gulam Mohammed Sheikh
speaks eloquently of his journeys through “home, living
cities and cities of imagination... which collapse into
each other [so that] something else might emerge.”
He shows slides of his hometown, Surendranagar in
Gujarat, recalling a clock tower and the horses and
tongas on its dusty streets. In other cities like Baroda,
he remembers mosques and other built structures. The
present lot, titled Recurring Image which he painted in
1962, is an early work which contains the beginnings of
notions of remembered places and memories that he
has spent a lifetime exploring.
While Sheikh drew inspiration from several sources,
including Persian, Mughal and Pahari miniatures, and
even European Renaissance art, his work retains an
impression of storytelling. Drawing from the narrative
of personal memories and histories, fragments that
combine the real with the imagined, Sheikh’s canvases
are imbued with a sense of magical realism, as seen in
the present lot. In a correspondence with Saffronart,
Sheikh explained the multiple cities and memories
layered in this work, as being “conceived and painted
without any external assistance.”
In his early years, he painted many “suffering, struggling
tonga horses of Surendranagar,” where he was born.
(The artist quoted in Gowri Ramnarayan, “Coming
home to one’s world,” The Hindu, 30 April 2006,
online) The equine motif recurs in the foreground in
the present lot, with the shadowy presence of two
horses. “Most of the horses I painted in the early years
of my career were white in colour, but not because
the horses I saw in my home town were all white. It
was a painterly decision. They were not drawn in the
likeness of the horses (on the tonga) I encountered.
This horse in black here is also part of a painterly
decision,” he said in a correspondence with Saffronart.
Sheikh expounded on the painting by picking out a
quote from his autobiographical essay, Among Many
Cultures and Times: “In the search for a singular image,
I devised (initially under the influence of M.F. Husain)
a whinnying white horse in chase or isolation, perched
on the horizon between dark expanses of earth and sky,
harnessed to a tonga or, more often, free of associations
of specific time and place.”
Gulam Mohammed Sheikh
Image courtesy of the artist
© Jyoti Bhatt