Vadehra Art Gallery’s ‘Of Cities and Tongas’ at Art Basel 2026 revisits the early 1960s works of Gulammohammed Sheikh, offering a rare look at the visual language that would shape one of the most significant artistic practices in modern and contemporary South Asian art.
At 89, Gulammohammed Sheikh occupies a singular place in Indian art history. One of the last living masters of the generation that emerged in the decades following India’s independence, he remains a vital link between the ambitions of Indian modernism and the more layered, pluralistic approaches that would later define post-modern art in India and South Asia. Throughout a career spanning more than six decades, as both an artist and an academic, Sheikh has continued to expand the possibilities of narrative painting, blending mythology, literature, memory, politics, and lived experience into richly imagined visual worlds.
For its presentation in the ‘Features’ section of Art Basel 2026, Vadehra Art Gallery has turned to a formative yet lesser-seen chapter in the career of Gulammohammed Sheikh. Titled ‘Of Cities and Tongas’, the solo exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, and paper collages from the early 1960s, offering visitors a rare glimpse into the visual idioms that would later shape one of the most influential artistic practices in modern and contemporary South Asian art.
‘Of Cities and Tongas’ returns to a period before Sheikh’s signature narrative panoramas took shape. Created shortly after the artist concluded his studies at Baroda, the works on view reveal an artist experimenting with form, perception, and the rapidly changing urban environment around him. Horses, horse-drawn carriages, and fragmented cityscapes appear throughout the exhibition, in works such as Horse in the Forest (1962), Horses (1961–62), Tonga in City (1961), City 5 (1961–62), and City 2 (1961–62).
These early works are compelling in the sense of transition and the momentum they contain. Positioned between the legacy of Indian modernism and a growing engagement with international artistic currents, they reveal Sheikh as an artist testing the possibilities of collage, pictorial tableaux, and shifting perspectives. The exhibition traces a decisive shift in his practice, from the heavily textured surfaces of his early Baroda years toward smoother planes, sharper contrasts, and a more mature visual language.
“It was early days, soon after finishing my master’s in fine arts in Baroda, that I had worked somewhat frantically, drawing and painting. A series of gouaches ensued — paint splashed and smeared all over. Most of these dealt with the theme of cities and of horse carriages (tongas),” Sheikh says about this early body of work.
“The images of the city sat so deeply in my unconscious that they imploded into large paintings in the years to come.”Gulammohammed Sheikh
Made in the years after Sheikh graduated from Baroda, these works are more than archival documents. They reveal an artistic imagination already grappling with questions that would come to define Sheikh’s mature practice, concerned with questions of how histories overlap, how memory inhabits space, and how individual experiences intersect with collective life. The horse and the carriage are more than recurring motifs in this body of work; more than six decades later, they remain the point of departure for one of the most remarkable journeys in Indian art.
Gulammohammed Sheikh’s ‘Of Cities and Tongas’, presented by Vadehra Art Gallery, is on view at Booth D2 in the Features section of Art Basel 2026 until 21 June. Learn more here.
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