In the soothing embrace of art

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.

- Somak Ghoshal

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 marvelous 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 neo-classical 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 color. 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.