In his recent show at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road gallery, Kaarawaan and Other Works, artist, poet and art historian Gulam Mohammed Sheikh rustled up an impressive ship’s manifest. Frida Kahlo was present, flanked by Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera. Below them, Bhupen Khakhar lingered, gun in hand. Huddled together in the prow of the ship, Caravaggio, Vincent Van Gogh and FN Souza rubbed shoulders, their elbows nudging the sides of other painting greats. The ship they all journey in is at the centre of Sheikh’s Kaarawaan, a gigantic work painted over five years, from 2019 to 2023. Kaarawaan takes up an entire wall; it is a Noah’s Ark of artists over the centuries, literary and poetic references and scenes from mythology—seamlessly cutting through vast tracts of space and time—at the tip of the prow, the 14^th century Italian painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti seems to look out at the Biblical prophet Jonah, who is about to be swallowed by a whale. The art exhibition was on view from April 5 - June 1, 2024.

Born in Baroda in Gujarat, where he still lives, Sheikh wrote and published in Gujarati before extending to Hindi and English. As an art student at MS University, he was introduced to artists and genres from across the world and was even invited to teach a survey of world art while still a student. He spent three years at the Royal College of Art in London in the 1960s, beginning to question what his own art practice back in India might look like. Sheikh’s artistic work harnesses both his literary and aesthetic concerns, drawing from personal and cultural memory to develop a unique style of visual narration. He mobilises the familiar visual language of pre-modern and medieval painting traditions in India to pose questions about how we live today.

Now 87, Sheikh unfailingly acknowledges the “team of painters” who helped him put together his gigantic canvases; for the central canvas, this included Jaldip Chauhan, Chirag Panchal, Hiren Patel and Vishal Prajapati. Walking around the exhibition, his output seems prolific. A section at the show's beginning delves into the process of composing an artwork at scale. Multiple pencil sketches of Kaarawaan, its huge ship adrift in the sea of time, dot the walls. As you walk from left to right, details appear—sections are defined, key characters distinguished, and the waves of the sea get sharper—even as an intense cluster of black lines, they seem to buffet the sparsely etched ship, getting ready to tip it off course.

Assembled in different ways, the discrete narrative elements in Sheikh’s works come together to tell a story. A sunlit corner of the gallery is given over to a display of his kavads, portable storytelling shrines with intricately painted panes that open out like a three-dimensional storybook. Kavads are now valued for the stories they tell and their significance as works of art. Sheikh uses his fascination with these folkloric objects, made by artisans from Rajasthan, to gesture to contemporary tropes of migration and displacement. In City Blues (2020), the human figures are phantoms, swallowed by the ghostly geometry of the empty city. A man is perched on a stationary motorbike, people go about their chores at home and in one scene, a parked scooter and a manhole cover stand sentinel at the foot of a dark, lonely street. The panes of the kavad fold into each other, forming a compact shrine where moments of human intimacy behind closed doors are never entirely subsumed by the crowded concrete skyline of the desolate city.

For the Chemould show, Sheikh worked with topographic forms like the tree of life and the map of the world, using his work to examine contemporary society and its multiple crises. Tree of Sleep takes the familiar motif of the tree as a metaphor for abundance and refuge. The tree is a two-dimensional presence, painted in an even green tint and set against a background of tropical red earth. Its branches taper to both sides, following a predictable symmetry. Human forms curl up in its shadows, the lingering air of fatigue accentuated by the creases in their clothes. Their slumber remains unbroken by the antics of the mythical forest creatures who dance on their bodies and leap over them. Each human figure is sketched out but not painted in, suggesting a drastic contrast to the colourful forest creatures for whom the tree and the forest are home. The humans have nowhere to go; they slump against the branches of the tree and sleep with their legs slung out to the side, simulating a sense of home in the absence of one. In Sheikh’s renderings, these charged mythical universes are not an escape from sobering contemporary realities; they serve to drive them home.

'Kaarawaan and Other Works' was on view at Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai from April 5 - June 1, 2024.