Om-Shiva

This work comes from the later part of J. Sultan Ali’s career, when abstraction had become more pronounced in his primitivist vocabulary. The painting renders familiar tropes from his practice in a seamless blend—a folk rendition of the major Hindu deity Lord Shiva, with his mount, the Nandi bull, also worshipped in its own right, taking centre stage. The two-colour tone is minimalist compared to his earlier works that were a rich mosaic of Indian motifs and scripts; so is the background, which is an amorphous depiction of energy that the deity emanates.