Nilima Sheikh is a visual artist based in Baroda, India. Since the mid-80s, Sheikh has done extensive research about traditional art forms in India, advocated for the sustainability of the practice of traditional painters, and used a wide range of visual and literary sources in her work. Her work focuses on displacement, longing, historical lineage, tradition, communal violence, and the ideas of femininity. She uses paper, painting, installation, large scrolls, theater set designs, as well as illustrations for children's books. She started exhibiting her work in 1969 and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most recently documenta 14, Athens and Kassel in 2017. Her first museum exhibition was organized by The Art Institute of Chicago in 2014.
Education
Sheikh studied history at the Delhi University between 1962 and 1965, and received her Master of Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1971. She was influenced by artists such as Kanwal Krishna, Devayani Krishna, and K.G. Subramanyan, and attributes the older Santiniketan experiment, Baroda's weightage to art history, and her earlier education in history as major influences. Sheikh who originally trained in Western-style oil painting and later transitioned to a self-taught miniature painter due to her interests in historical traditions of painting in Asia. She has also stated to be influenced by pre-modern Rajput and Mughal court paintings, especially traditional tempera paintings like Pichhwai and Thangka paintings.
Research and works
In the mid-1980s, she received a fellowship to document the traditional art forms, especially Picchwai paintings of Nathdwara. She made drawings of the motifs of these art forms, documented the tools and methods they use, and also corresponded with organizations related to cultural heritage to ask for support for the preservation of these art forms. After the inner turmoil that she experienced post the Gujarat riots in 2002, she was spurred to take up a long-pending art project that dealt with the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali’s soul-stirring verses full of pain that inspired it. Nilima Sheikh won’t term references in her work as religious, but more art historical in nature, all part of a history that we tend to term tradition or mythology. Actually it is history, part of one’s past, she explains, adding that it’s not merely Western art history.
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions include Terrain: Carrying Across, Leaving Behind, Gallery Chemould, Mumbai ; "Each night put Kashmir in your dreams," Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, and The Art Institute of Chicago ; Drawing Trails, Gallery Espace, Delhi, India ; The Country Without A Post Office, Gallery Chemould, Mumbai ; Painted Drawings, Gallery Espace, New Delhi ; and Images from Umrao, Galerie FIA, Amsterdam. Group exhibitions include documenta 14, Athens and Kassel ; Revisiting Beauty, Gallery Threshold, New Delhi ; 48th Annual Exhibition 2015, Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Calcutta ; Aesthetic Bind | Floating World, Chemould Prescott Rd, Colaba ; Touched by Bhupen, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Colaba ; and Tracing Time - Works On Paper, Bodhi Art, Mumbai. Sheikh's work is part of public collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and The New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester. Asia Art Archive, a Hong Kong-based nonprofit, organized an exhibition drawing from the artist's archive in 2018. The exhibition explores travel as a method for research and artistic techniques as a tool to reinterpret material cultures and histories across national borders. In 2017 Sheikh's work was exhibited in documenta 14 in Athens, Greece, and in Kassel, Germany. Nilima's 'Salaam Chechi', an exhibition of paintings dedicated to the ubiquitous Malayali nurse, was shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2018-2019.
