born 1937 · Surendranagar, Gujarat
Gulammohammed Sheikh
Baroda painter, poet and teacher whose pictures gather many places and times into one surface. He has worked for more than six decades as painter, poet and teacher.
Gulammohammed Sheikh was born in 1937 in Surendranagar, in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, taking his BA in 1959 and his MA in 1961, and then went to the Royal College of Art in London, where he received his ARCA in 1966.
He began teaching at Baroda in 1960 and stayed, apart from the London years, for over three decades: first art history, then painting, retiring as professor in 1993. It was Sheikh who in 1958 encouraged a young chartered accountant, Bhupen Khakhar, to visit the Faculty.
His paintings tell stories, and they map. The critic Chaitanya Sambrani has written that Sheikh’s art narrates the world in order to make it again, and that the narrating and the mapping are bound together. In the Mappa Mundi series he takes the old form of the world map and builds personal universes from it, drawing on the miniature portable shrine, and invites the viewer to put together a map of their own.
He is a writer as well. Athwa (1974), a book of Gujarati poems with a surrealist edge, won him wide praise, and he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Gujarati in 2022. He received the Padma Shri in 1983 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014. In 2025 the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi staged a survey of his work, Of Worlds Within Worlds. He lives in Vadodara with his wife, the painter Nilima Sheikh.
Notable works
- Mappa Mundi (series)