At 80, Nilima Sheihk Renders the Lush Landscapes of Her Childhood

Nilima Sheikh once trekked through the lush landscapes she now captures in her massive kaleidoscopic paintings. The Indian artist, 80, spent her childhood traversing the mountainous region of Kashmir with her mother. Around 2000, she began revisiting those memories in “Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams,” a series of colorful, map-like paintings. Five of these works now hang at the center of “Fractured Skies,” Sheikh’s debut New York solo show, on view in the first-floor gallery at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and co-organized by New Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA).

“We would often go off the beaten track,” Sheikh tells Bazaar, pointing to the verdant alpine landscape of Valley (2003–10), currently hanging at MoMA. “I knew the topography of Kashmir in a way that informed a lot of the visuality of my paintings. I’ll tell you this painting was the first of the series, and for me, it was like going back to Kashmir and mapping out the different sites that I used to visit.”

On view through June 13, 2027, “Fractured Skies” brings together 18 painted canvases that move between the remembered landscapes of Sheikh’s ancestral home and scenes of contemporary violence. Five works from “Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams,” each spanning 10 feet by 6 feet, feature intricate narrative scenes on one side and hand-painted text excerpts from literature, poetry, and newspapers on the other. Three smaller kaleidoscopic mountainscapes from “Home/Land” hang on opposing walls, while 10 hanging, scroll-like, double-sided paintings from Sheikh’s latest series, “Shahid/Witness,” hover above the back of the gallery, depicting a form of contemporary violence, from warfare to climate change. “I make my viewers work hard,” she jokes. The exhibition offers a long-overdue celebration in the United States of an artist who has spent five decades expanding the possibilities of painting.

“Sheikh’s practice demonstrates that painting can be a powerful tool to question history, asking who gets to tell it and how the act of retelling may change it,” Cara Manes, associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, tells Bazaar. “Drawing on image, text, craft traditions, literature, and historical memory across time and place, she has developed a singular language for thinking through the relationship between art and history—one that connects her to a radical tradition of artists who have continually reimagined what painting can be and what histories it can hold.”

Born in British India in 1945, Sheikh grew up in a household full of doctors, but her family supported her creative aspirations. Along with excursions into nature, her mother took her to museums to see paintings. She credits two childhood schoolteachers (who were also well-known painters), Kanwal and Devyani Krishna, for truly cultivating her interest in art. “They were not just teaching you how to make drawings of apples,” Sheikh jokes.

She began studying history at Delhi University in 1962 before pivoting to study painting at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. There, she found inspiration in K.G. Subramanyan, who served as the dean of the university’s Faculty of Fine Arts from 1968 to 1974, and her husband, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, who “opened up the world of art history for me,” she says. Her husband was a key figure in the Baroda Group, a collective of artists associated with the university’s fine-arts faculty who helped forge an experimental approach to Indian modernism, moving beyond the revivalist traditions of the Bengal School. But as she built a life and practice of her own, Sheikh always felt slightly out of sync with that scene because her experiences as a woman differed from those of the male artists around her.

“Soon after I graduated and my husband and I got married and had children, I realized that my life was fairly different from these other male artists around me that I was spending this time with,” she recalls. “It made me look at things a little differently.”

That difference took on devastating significance some years later, when a girl who often came to her home to play with her children was killed by her in-laws over an insufficient dowry. This “dowry death,” as Sheikh calls it, was somewhat common practice, a systemic act of violence against women in arranged marriages. The artist felt compelled to paint. “That really shook me up in a way, and I needed to find a way of talking about the issues that I was dealing with, but also finding a way that I could communicate or a format through which I paint,” she explains. The resulting series, “When Champa Grew Up,” comprised 12 paintings created in the mid-’80s.

From then on, Sheikh pioneered feminist artwork in India. In 1987, she helped organize “Through the Looking Glass,” a traveling exhibition series featuring her work alongside fellow Indian artists Nalini Malani, Madhvi Parekh, and Arpita Singh. The cheeky title came from Singh, whom Sheikh remembers exclaiming, “We are all Alices!” Together, the four artists made space for their perspectives within a male-dominated art world.

“Artists such as Nilima Sheikh focused on intimate and localized representations, responding to domesticity, the internal life of a woman, and the everyday unfolding around her,” Roobina Karode, artistic director and chief curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, tells Bazaar. “Women artists were inclined to present micro-histories and silenced voices instead of the grand narrative. They challenged the existing gendered dichotomy of ‘fine art’ versus ‘craft’ by embracing marginalized mediums and materials in shaping their visual language.… Nilima Sheikh sums it up: ‘The struggle was not so much about how to defer the tenets of modernism as about seeking a feminine voice.’ ”

Her work gradually reached American institutions. In 2001, Asia Society presented “Conversations with Traditions,” pairing her paintings with those of Shahzia Sikander. Her first U.S. institutional solo exhibition followed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, bringing together 11 paintings from “Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams.”

In “Each Night,” Sheikh’s memories of Kashmir extend across sprawling landscapes where everyday scenes intermingle with spiritual figures. “I see each work as an extension of the other, even though they are discrete, independent, separate works,” she says.

Commissioned by KNMA and MoMA, “Shahid/Witness” extends that layered approach to scenes of contemporary violence, war, and environmental disaster. Suspended overhead, the 10 paintings position the sky as a witness to the events unfolding below. The gallery’s tall ceilings helped inspire the series. “When I saw the site that I was going to be showing in, I said, ‘This is an opportunity to work with the notion of the sky,’ ” she says.

In Forest Fire (2025–26), a painting from “Shahid/Witness,” flames consume a forest beneath a midnight-blue sky. Another work in the series, Street Injustice (2025–26), depicts several scenes of violence beneath multiple skies.

“An important thing is that you don’t look from just one vantage point,” Sheikh says. “You can shift your horizons and move. We’re living in troubled times. There are environmental disasters happening everywhere. There’s war happening. There is violence. The sky is the witness, and does that remain a point of redemption or hope?”

Some works feel uncannily urgent, such as Climate Change/Flood 2 (2025–26), which features floodwater surging down a mountain, carrying debris in its wake. Sheikh created the painting before the devastating floods that swept through Nepal’s Trishuli River valley this past August. At 80, she continues to observe a world in turmoil. In some ways, she functions like the skies she paints, a benevolent witness to the upheaval below. But she also confronts it, bringing the same tenacity to depictions of natural disaster that she has long brought to critiques of violence against women. Looking up at the suspended artworks, she interrupts herself to make one refrain: “One can never talk of disasters without some notion of redemption.”