Important Notice

Over the last several years, Nilima Sheikh’s body of work has focused on the troubled Northern Indian state of Kashmir, juxtaposing its rich traditions and exquisite environs with the violence that has marked its recent history. “In her attempt to understand something of the plight, the reality, of Kashmir today, to hope to arrive at this understanding through the process of her own painting, Nilima Sheikh was drawn to the work of Agha Shahid... Over the last several years, Nilima Sheikh’s body of work has focused on the troubled Northern Indian state of Kashmir, juxtaposing its rich traditions and exquisite environs with the violence that has marked its recent history. “In her attempt to understand something of the plight, the reality, of Kashmir today, to hope to arrive at this understanding through the process of her own painting, Nilima Sheikh was drawn to the work of Agha Shahid Ali, the poet of Kashmiri origin…Ali specifically addressed the trauma that has engulfed Kashmir since 1990 and articulated the complex interweavings of pain, guilt, remorse, loss, confusion, terror and desire bought on by this situation. Ali’s poetry is often sublimely visual and easily ignited Sheikh’s imagination. His verses routinely contrast the natural beauty of Kashmir with the ugliness of its predicament and the abhorrent actions of human beings there. Many phrases, taken out of context, seem to be exhortations to Sheikh to paint: ‘smashed golds,’ ‘petrified reds,’ ‘a jade rain,’ and ‘black on edges of flames’ are just a few of the actual hues which move directly from Ali’s sonnets to Sheikh’s brush” (Peter Nagy, “We’re Inside the Fire, Looking for the Dark” in Nilima Sheikh: The Country without a Post Office, Gallery Chemould exhibition catalogue, 2003, not paginated).

The present lot is titled The Last Saffron after one of Ali’s poems published in his 1992 anthology The Country without a Post Office. Here, Sheikh inscribes several couplets extracted from the poem against a rich saffron-crimson ground derived from Ali’s imagery of a tiny island in a sunset-lit sea. Working with tempera on Sanganer wasli paper, the artist borrows from “both Eastern and Western, both Modernist and Traditional” in her vocabulary and creative process. While they are reminiscent of Indian miniature paintings, her works also nod to Islamic and Buddhist traditions of intricate illumination. “She has preferred the forms of the paper scroll, the banners and tents stitched from cloth, the folding screen rather than the stretched canvas as her supports. These have brought to her works senses of the sacred, the nomadic, the home-made and the performative and, by extension, infused in them the discourses of Feminism, the Sub-Altern, the Temporal and the Marginalised. Simultaneously, she has rendered figurative and naturalistic imageries with a painterly language inherited from the most rigorous of Modernisms, one that eschewed all content for the appreciation of literalness, physicality and flatness” (Ibid.).

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