Gulam Mohammed Sheikh is a globally celebrated painter, author and art critic. Born in February 16th, 1937 in Surendranagar, Saurashtra in Gujarat, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh is an alumni of Faculty of Fine arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. He also went to Royal College of Art, London under the Commonwealth Scholarship in 1963.

In 1960s, Gulam Sheikh was amongst the group of artists in Baroda who brought a new revolution in the language of Indian art by experimentations in the narrative mode and figuration. Inspired by the past practices of the art of Miniatures and other living traditions, Sheikh started his artistic journey by creating a mystical web of figures in his paintings. Much inspired by the philosophy of mystic poet and saint, Kabir, Sheikh's works are an amalgamation of his own autobiographies, historical narratives, textual suggestions and Bhakti and Sufi poetry at the same time.

In his vivid and surreal depictions, one can see concurrent tales and multiplicity in perspectives as well as contexts, emerging out of the pictorial space. Sheikh, with Jyoti Bhatt, Jeram Patel and others, was also the co-founder of the 'Group 1890', a collective of twelve young artists formed in 1963 in resistance to the stale modern art practice taking place at that time. Between 1982-1993, he taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda as a Professor of painting.

Sheikh paints on formats ranging from hand-held paper to architectural scale, to bring the world he knows, sees and seeks, into his life; to illumine it in its complexities and contradictions, reinventing art history while painting. The impressions, especially of the early years of life, the tales he heard and the myths he grew up with, found expression as images in poetry first, and later, in painting.
But where his paintings are concerned, Kabir (the legendary poet / saint) has always been his source of inspiration, right from his schooldays. As the artist himself says, "Kabir has been a seminal figure from the period in which he lived up to the present day. People live with his thoughts and words ... he was not a preacher and spoke against sects. If people have made a sect out of Kabir, it is not of his making."