Facets of artist Gulammohammed Sheikh’s works

Gulammohammed Sheikh’s works have a poetic logic which incorporates, the languages of memory (personal as well as collective), contexts (historical and contemporary) and structures (pictorial and conceptual) coalescing in a unique logic of the imagination.

• It permits a view of history as without perspective and a mode of composition that does not forget the past but incorporates it and moves beyond it to offer a space of contemplation. His work goes beyond the limitations of coherent logic while conveying the deep complexity and truth of the hidden phenomenon and impalpable connections of life, while offering us, the viewer the opportunity to discern the lines of the poetic design of being.
• Every surface of paint simmered with a feeling of touch, with the result that the walls in the paintings smelled of human warmth’. The artist is also firmly rooted in the nature of multitude of narratives, where the characters and the physical attributes of a location rather than a framework indicate location.
• So a work is not wholly site specific  (with the exception of City for Sale) in as much as experience based, mingling with specifics related to memory, history, tales and folklore and a leveling of time. The physicality of the work draws the viewer into the pathways that cross those of the printed image and the painted image and there is a distinct discursive and educational aspect to the work.
• In particular the physicality of a meandering allows for a contemplation that is natural, and not framed or forced as such, and where the edges of comprehension spread far beyond the visible edges of the paper. The encapsulation of lived experiences, told tales, and narrated fictions are also in part physical recordings of journeys real and imagined, on part of the artist, which we as viewers are invited to take.
• As such there is also an abstract construct in place that enlarges the parameters of the work by removing any attempt on part of the viewer to envision a linear narrative…

(Information courtesy: Renuka Sawhney  A Floating Object The Guild Collection – Series I – 2012)