New Delhi, Gallery Espace, Nilima Sheikh DRAWING TRAILS, April 2009

Good overall condition, as viewed.
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Nilima Sheikh studied History before completing a Fine Art degree at M.S. University in Baroda. Her knowledge of the past permeates her work. The large scrolls and screens she creates are inspired by Buddhist and Islamic scroll painting. The minute scale of the figures in her works is indicative of the Indian miniature tradition, particularly Rajasthani, Pahari and Mughal idioms. Sheikh also received a Government Fellowship to study the picchavais of Nathdwara. She was mentored by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh and K. G. Subramanyan, who instilled in her the importance of folk art and craft as well as narrative figuration. The colours and delicate lines in her works are informed by these interests in traditional techniques.

‘Nilima Sheikh has worked out a style that has the fresh inventiveness of a combined aesthetic, bringing together the conceptual poetry of the miniature and the compositional clarity and mood of the seventeenth-century Japanese woodcut, while employing naturalistic rendering in the case of specific images, as a figure, animal or vegetation. There is a coordinative sympathy between her style and her subjects, which refer to nature and incidents from everyday life, the drama of the home, the ambiguities of human relationships, animals and children at play.’ (Chaitanya Sambrani, Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India, Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2005, p. 48)

Sheikh’s subject matter often invites the viewer to dwell on issues of violence and suffering. Since 2000, Sheikh’s work has been influenced by her concern with the unrest and brutality occuring in Kashmir. Another Chronicle of Loss depicts two anguished men, human bones strewn around the lower register, while winged figures fly across the sky. In Shadows, Stains, a figureಌ missing an arm is depicted, his mutilated limb and swords lay scattered across the work and the words "but where has your shadow fallen, like cloth on the tomb of which saint, or the body of which unburied boy in the mountains” are stenciled in the lowe🍨r section. Sheikh is narrating these tales of loss and sorrow through the use of literal and allegorical symbols in a refreshing and contemporary context.