Poetic representations of the everyday and the supra-mundane are the hallmarks of Nilima’s Sheikh’s practice.

Nilima’s Sheikh’s practice has embraced various kinds of paintings, from the hand-held miniature to the construct at an architectural scale, and from conventionally hung paintings to scrolls and screens for the theatre stage.

Usually blending her colors from pigment with casein or other tempera medium, there is a sensuous immediacy in poetic representations of the everyday and the supra-mundane. She uses, and indeed, often constructs the surface of her work with the stencils made by the Sanjhi artists of Mathura.

Having spent almost all of her student and professional life in Baroda, she acknowledges her debt to teachers like KG Subramanyan, and to the older Santiniketan experiment which recognized the value of history in reinventing tradition and in bridging the dichotomies between craft traditions and studio practice.

Born in New Delhi in 1945, Nilima Sheikh studied History at Delhi University (1962-65) and Painting at Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (1965-71) where she taught painting between 1977 and 1981.

The artwork presented in her new show can be seen as part of an unbroken trajectory, a set of preoccupations that have engaged her for several years now, more or less since 2000. Most immediately, these works resonate with the themes and the representational strategies that can be seen at play in the Firdaus and The Country without a Post Office series.

What is strikingly new, however, is the systematic way she explores the theme of community suffering in the face of sectarian violence and state brutality, mapping the difficult terrain where the everyday life of people intersects with large events in the public domain.  Sheikh’s works thematize violence, terror, trauma, grief of ordinary people in Kashmir and Gujarat.

Carefully avoiding the easy conflation of these two places via the axis of community, she explores the relationship of people to the place they live in, offers accounts of their ‘return’ to those spaces of violence which once constituted the very domain of everyday life. The motif of the return haunts the suite of sixteen works at New Delhi’s Gallery Espace but in a way that refuses both a simple nostalgia as well as an unfettered confidence in the resilience of an oppressed people. The tension that is laid out across these incommensurate pulls forms the basis of her deceptively lyrical works in the present series.
Nilima’s Sheikh’s show ‘Drawing Trails’