Mind the print | Gulammohammed Sheikh's 'Hand Prints / Mind Prints'

Pushpamala N. has known Gulammohammed Sheikh for close to half a century now. The 89-year-old artist, art historian and writer, after all, was also her professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in the 1970s. One would imagine that those many decades of knowing and observing someone in their closest quarters would leave little room for surprise. But Sheikh had a big one up his sleeve for Pushpamala, the curator of his latest retrospective at TRI Art and Culture Gallery in Kolkata, titled Hand Prints / Mind Prints.

It’s an ongoing two-part exhibition of Sheikh’s lifelong fascination with printmaking, which has remained relatively unknown to his audience. The artist has remained unfazed by that. “Well, it’s not that my prints were not shown, but they were shown in either some shows of printmaking or in group shows. They were not picked out especially to project that aspect,” he says. “My printmaking was generally known among printmakers, perhaps, and among some artists, but not everybody.”

Part one of the show, Hand Prints, is laid out like an archive, tracing Sheikh’s handmade print practice from the 1950s to the present, and includes his woodcuts, linocuts, etchings, aquatints, lithographs and silkscreens. It also examines his prolific involvement with magazines as a means of democratising art and ideas, with the handwritten school journal Pragati (1952), the avant-garde literary journal Kshitij (1957–63) and Vrishchik (Scorpio, 1969–73), which he co-founded with Bhupen Khakhar.

“When he started showing me the little magazines, I got really excited because they became my entry point into this entire body of 70 years of handprints,” Pushpamala says about her chance encounter with this part of his repertoire only as recently as 2023. “From the 1950s to the 2020s, he had been working across different printmaking processes, and what struck me was that all of his various interests seemed to converge in these magazines, in the earlier days.”

But printmaking has always been foundational to Sheikh’s practice. In fact, he even studied it at the institution where he later taught, and continues to engage with it even today, picking up a plate on a whim to do some of his etchings, as one would doodle. For Sheikh, his engagement with this medium extends beyond his studio, into learning from artists from across the world. “There was a specific period when we began looking seriously at major printmakers, and the work of the Japanese woodblock master Shiko Munakata, whose prints made a deep impression on me. I also studied European printmaking, particularly the work of artists from the decades after Cubism,” Sheikh says.

The second part of the exhibition, titled Mind Prints, showcases Sheikh’s striking engagement with digital printmaking since 2001, when he first encountered computers as an artistic tool at the erstwhile ARTunderground gallery’s New Media Art workshop in Baroda. The title follows the artist’s logic that, in digital art, the machine replaces the hands with the mind, making the mind crucial to finding, composing and making images. These works have distinctly saturated colours and explore themes that play with space and time, drawing inspiration from Kabir and the Ebstorf Mappamundi (a medieval European map of the world) to Mughal miniatures, Renaissance painting and world cinema.

What stood out for Pushpamala in this regard was Sheikh’s curiosity, compared with that of his contemporaries, who were mostly purists and hesitant to try new technology. It’s also what allowed him to blur the lines between painting and digital printmaking. “He sees a different kind of opportunity in this, and starts painting on these digital prints. And not only that, sometimes he would paint a background, scan it, and then work on it digitally,” Pushpamala says. Sheikh constantly moves between mediums—painting, scanning, digitally manipulating and painting again.

Soon after starting out on digital, Sheikh realised how seductive technology can be, and had to consciously rein in his urge to use every tool at his disposal. “It was offering me options before my own knowledge, and it had the potential to influence my way of thinking,” he says.

Immediately after, and almost inadvertently, the artist cautions youngsters against being charmed by what’s on their screens. “Technology gives you options; it does not necessarily help you think,” Sheikh says, underlining what truly defines an artist to this day.

—The exhibition is on display till August 2