Gallery Espace brings to Delhi a solo show of Nilima Sheikh after a gap of six years

New Delhi: Gallery Espace presents Drawing Trails; Work on paper 2008-09 by Nilima Sheikh, a solo exhibition of 16 large works (tempera on sanganer paper) and 15 book illustrations by veteran artist Nilima Sheikh. The exhibition comes after a gap of six years at Gallery Espace, 16, Community Centre, New Friends Colony from April 17, 2009 to May 30, 2009. The exhibition will also be accompanied with a well documented catalogue with a comprehensive essay by Baroda-based scholar Deeptha Achar.
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.

In the current show, in her characteristic style, which engages the contemporary through a careful positioning of diverse techniques and histories, Nilima’s works engage with violence, trauma and grief in the lives of ordinary people in troubled regions, using the mediation of the written word. Her imagined geographies set up a play between the fantastic and the real in a way that allows the emotional landscape of the remembering self to emerge. While exploring the theme of community suffering in the face of sectarian violence and state brutality, her language works its way through art histories of visual traditions, particularly of Asia.

Many of her works are accompanied with excerpts from various articles and poems. For example her work titled A girl called Bhawan includes a poem by Nund Rishi/ Hazrat Nuruddin (1356-1440 C.E.). Similarly, My hometown carries an excerpt from the article ‘My Hometown’ by MK Raina, published in Communalism Combat, January 2005. Route 2 and Tree Planter are her works on Kashmir, with a focus on the poetry of Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali.
What happened that day 3 with an excerpt from Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie carries the following text in it: “What happened that day in Pachigam need not be set down here in full detail, because brutality is brutality and excess is excess and that’s all there is to it. There are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun. So, to repeat: there was no Pachigam any more. Pachigam was destroyed. Imagine it yourself. Second attempt: The village of Pachigam still existed on maps of Kashmir, but that day it ceased to exist anywhere else, except in memory. Third and final attempt: The beautiful village of Pachigam still exists.


Her illustrations in the book Moon in the pot by Gopini Karunakar showcase the story of a child’s urge to play with the moon. The story is narrated through the eyes of a small kid whose grandmother Guddawwa creates a magical world of stories for her grandson. Old Guddawwa faced a life full of struggle and hardships and her only muse were her grandchildren and other kids in the community. An extract from the book to which Nilima has added her colourful illustrations reads as follows: In the summer, one evening, it rained very heavily. That night the flame-of-the-forest tree in our backyard blossomed with stars. My little brother, Peerubabu, my little sister Vasanta, and I, went near the tree. The tree glittered bright with stars. Vasanta looked at the tree in wonder and covering her mouth with her hands exclaimed, “Oyyamma! So many stars!” I caught hold of a branch and shook it. The stars fell to the ground like flowers. We gathered the stars in our clothes and ran to Guddawwa. ( We call her Guddawwa because she has only one eye.) the stars glittered in our hair, on our clothes. We shone brightly as if we wore stars for flowers in our hair and starry shirts and frocks! Pointing to the stars on her frock, Vasanta said, “Awwa, look! So many stars!” “But they are not stars. They are fireflies”, said Guddawwa. “Fireflies! What are they, Awwa?” I asked.

Nilima’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 colours 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.