“The artist’s role is to bear witness—to both the past and the present,” says Nilima Sheikh. Over the course of her five-decade career, Sheikh has transformed narrative painting as a new way of engaging with history, highlighting lived experiences, illuminating regional stories, and foregrounding women’s voices. Her research-based art practice draws on a vast array of historical accounts, archival materials, and literary sources. Adapting the traditional scroll format and painting primarily in casein and gum temperas, Sheikh weaves together image, text, and stenciled patterning to create multilayered narratives that unfold as interconnected vignettes.

Since the early 2000s, Sheikh has often turned her attention to the Kashmir Valley, the culturally rich and politically complex northernmost region of the Indian subcontinent. Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies brings together selections from her series Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14) and Home, Land (2023–25) alongside Shahid (Witness) (2025–26), a new, site-responsive set of paintings commissioned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. These three major bodies of work trace the depth of Sheikh’s engagement with the region over the past two decades and reflect the broader themes that inform her expansive practice: violence, displacement, loss, and the enduring power of human connection.

Born in New Delhi, Sheikh was a member of the generation of artists working and studying in Baroda (now Vadodara) in the late 1960s, who helped shape contemporary art in post-Partition India. Through her visionary painting practice, Sheikh has established herself as one of the most consequential artists working in South Asia today.

Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (KNMA). The exhibition is organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, and Roobina Karode, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, KNMA, with Elizabeth Wickham, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, and Avijna Bhattacharya, Senior Curator, KNMA.

About the Artist

Nilima Sheikh

Based in Baroda, India, Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945, New Delhi, India) studied history at Delhi University from 1962 to 1965. In 1971, she received a master’s in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Nilima played a key role in shaping contemporary Indian art. She is the recipient of the Nandjunda Rao Award by Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore (2021), and the Gagan Aban Puraskar Award by Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan (2011). Her recent solo exhibitions include Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2018); Gallery Espace at Bikaner House, New Delhi (2018); Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2017); the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2014); and Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2010). Nilima’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester; Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah; Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.