Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Tree over Mountains (1970)
The most comprehensive retrospective of one of India’s greatest artists, the painter, poet and pedagogue Gulammohammed Sheikh, will span his career from the 1960s to the present day. More than 100 works will be shown, ranging from oil paintings, ink drawings, digital collages, accordion books, poems, photographs and ceramic sculptural objects. Large-scale structures and installations will also feature, including Kaavad: Travelling Shrine (2008), a “room” of folding doors and walls made of painted boards mounted onto a steel structure.
Mumbai-based Shilpa Gupta is one of South Asia’s foremost contemporary artists, known for producing visually striking works charged with metaphor which comment on hard-hitting social themes such as cross-border migration and state censorship. Her solo exhibition at Bikaner House will bring together recent work, some of which has never been shown in India. This includes Listening Air, a 2019 immersive sound installation using microphones refitted with speakers and suspended across a room. These emit songs of resilience recorded from around the world.
Forward-thinking exhibition space and education centre Arthshila hosts a group exhibition of art and craft works inspired by “India’s profound and timeless relationship to water”. Curated by the craft specialist art historian Anjana Somany, the show will include works by Shama Pawar, Harsh Verma and Made in Earth collective, as well as contributions by some of India’s leading scholars such as Naman Ahuja.
Khoj's latest exhibition-fundraiser comprises more than 70 works from past residents, including highly regarded artists Manjot Kaur and Sahil Naik. Artists were invited to donate or create work “to speculate on the future of our lived environment”. Many of the works in the show dwell on concepts such as non-human life forms, dystopias and alternative realities. Gopa Roy’s straw and paper-pulp pages, fastened together with hinges to form a star-shaped constellation, show scenes of environmental destruction. Shailesh BR even gives a preview of what this future may feel like with his motion-sensitive, vibrating kinetic sculpture, The First Earthquake (2024).
Read a full preview on the exhibition here.
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