Important Notice

“The paintings of a lone horse in a desolate ‘landscape’ in my early years carry an intensity to unravel unknown fonts of desire.”
- GULAM MOHAMMED SHEIKH

Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s time as a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda’s Maharaja Sayajirao University was very generative to his practice. Being plunged headfirst into a society of driven artists encouraged him to experiment with his work. Speaking of the creative... “The paintings of a lone horse in a desolate ‘landscape’ in my early years carry an intensity to unravel unknown fonts of desire.”
- GULAM MOHAMMED SHEIKH

Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s time as a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Baroda’s Maharaja Sayajirao University was very generative to his practice. Being plunged headfirst into a society of driven artists encouraged him to experiment with his work. Speaking of the creative drive provided by the setting he said, “Baroda was a second birth. Immersed/subsumed in the practice of art, day and night… We were all charged by an energy that made it possible to ‘live’ art. Whatever techniques or forms with which we experimented were part of a struggle to evolve a personal idiom or to follow the inner stirrings of one’s being.” (Artist quoted in Nawaid Anjum, “The Gulammohammed Sheikh Interview: Portrait of An Artist”, The Punch Magazine, 25 October 2021, online) Eventually he began to look beyond Baroda in his search for unique artistic expression. His appetite for modernism led him to the Progressive Artists’ Group, whose pronounced influence can be seen in the present lot.

This painting, made in 1962, is an expressionist work reminiscent of S H Raza’s abstract landscapes. Architecture and the countryside are represented by simple forms instead of being realistically rendered. Sheikh worked brushes, knives and fingers furiously to form a thick impasto similar to Raza’s paintings. The powerful swipes created a dramatic texture quite unlike the flat application characteristic of his later works. This texture was also a feature of the early works of other PAG associates like F N Souza and Walter Langhammer. He used this technique to build up a dark palette of overwhelmingly black, brown and white shades with reds and yellows showing up intermittently. The result is a haunting image, a deserted landscape with a lone unmoored figure.

The horse was an important recurring motif in Sheikh’s early work. It shows up in about half of all paintings he created between the years 1960 and 1963, including the present lot. He was inspired just as much by the tonga and ghoda-gaadi (horse- drawn cart) of his hometown, Surendranagar, as by M F Husain’s iconic spirited horses. “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. I painted these elements over and over again in different combinations until the reductive process led to repetitions as the emotional surge ebbed. Most of the paintings seemed to be haunted by images that stood outside their frames.” (Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, “Among Several Cultures and Times”, Journal of Arts & Ideas, New Delhi: Tulika Print Communication, Circa 1995, p. 110)

However, this “primeval horse which stood before our eyes as a still, nightmarish form” (“In Search of the Secret Life: 15 Paintings by G.R. Santosh”, Richard Bartholomew, The Art Critic, Noida: BART, 2012, p. 456) stood in contrast to the vigorous rearing horses from Husain’s canvases. Unlike Husain’s timeless figures, Sheikh drew from a specific time and place to create disconsolate forms which he divorced from identifying particulars by stranding them in the dark. Expounding on Sheikh’s decision to isolate the horse in this image art historian Chaitanya Sambrani says, “...the horses appeared lost, their necks drawn out as through searching, or stretched out as if in anticipation of the butcher’s blade… the horses too were devoid of individual qualities: they appeared as featureless beings of indeterminate origin and doomed to solitude even when in company.” (Chaitanya Sambrani, “Baroda: ‘A Stepping Stone to World Art”, Chaitanya Sambrani ed., At Home in the World: The Art and Life of Gulammohamed Sheikh, New Delhi: Tulika Books in association with Vadehra Art Gallery, 2019, p. 108)

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