nilima sheikh

Over a 40-year artistic career based in Baroda, Nilima Sheikh has unfolded personal and universal concerns with femininity through work that as often evokes timeless poetry as national politics. After studying painting at the MS University, Baroda in the 1960s and 1970s, Sheikh's concerns entwined with those of other emerging artists who strove to situate figuration and narrative in a contemporary context. Drawing from and translating the vocabulary of Indian painting traditions, the formats of Sheikh's projects have ranged from small works reminiscent of Mughal and Rajput miniatures to vertical scrolls that take root in East Asian traditions.

"Songspace," exhibited in 1995 at Gallery Chemould, Bombay and at Africus, the First Johannesburg Biennale, comprised five vertical, casein on canvas scrolls. The series' delicate, translucent colors intoned painterly and lyrical rhyme in its suggestions of an imagined landscape. "Shamiana," erected in 1996 for the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial and at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, transcended specifics of time, space, and narrative with lightly lain tempera on canvasses hung beneath a painted canopy.

"Conversations with Traditions: Nilima Sheikh and Shahzia Sikander" at Asia Society and Museum, New York in 1996, exhibited the artists' distinct engagements with early modern Indian painting. Included was Sheikh's landmark series "When Champa Grew Up" (1984), which narrated the tragic life story of a woman murdered for her dowry by her husband's family. Arising from her lasting interest in narration and writing, Sheikh offered the lyrics from Gujarati oral folk songs as accompanying texts for that series.

In "The Country Without A Post Office: Reading Shahid Ali," a solo exhibition at Chemould in 2003 that took its name from an anthology of Ali's writing, Sheikh presented a visualization of poetics and politics. The artist's employ of Ali's poetry, focused on the contemporary conflict in Kashmir, reflected on the inherent conflicts between aesthetics and trauma. As in some of Sheikh's earlier work, these paintings employed the syntax of free verse, with compositional narratives developing not from linear descriptions but from the flexibility of independent layered readings.

Beth Citron