At Home in the World
The Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh
Chaitanya Sambrani, Marcia Kupfer, Coilin Parsons, Karin Zitzewitz
Edited by Chaitanya Sambrani
Gulammohammed Sheikh has played a pioneering role in contemporary Indian art’s engagement with hybridity and a plural inheritance. Resolutely attentive to the multiplicity of experience and systems of representation and belief in the subcontinent, Sheikh’s art re-imagines relationships with the often paradoxical nature of tradition. In a practice stretching more than five decades and across painting and digital media, Sheikh has sought to articulate a way of incorporating his fascination with historical figures and sources stretching from Italy to China in an encyclopaedic endeavour, producing contemporary art that unashamedly declares its affiliations to earlier ways of seeing, thinking and doing. At Home in the World presents the first comprehensive study of the art and life of this seminal figure, bringing together aspects of biographical discussion alongside other modes of art-historical analysis.
Chaitanya Sambrani accomplishes the remarkable task of writing Sheikh’s life and works with insight and comprehensive diligence. . . . The book includes a remarkably detailed chronology with many fascinating photographs of family and art world events. These place Sheikh in the history of modern Indian art since the 1960s, and there is a bibliography including Sheikh’s publications as well as details of his literary activities in Gujarati.
John Clark, Art History