Nilima Sheikh is getting her first solo presentation in New York. Fractured Skies opens at the Museum of Modern Art on Sept. 27 and runs through June 13, 2027, bringing together work from the past two decades by an artist who has spent much of her five-decade career testing what narrative painting can hold.

Sheikh’s paintings draw on history, poetry, archival material and oral traditions. She often works with casein and gum tempera, adapting formats associated with scroll painting and layering image, text and stenciled pattern. The result is less a single scene than a sequence of connected fragments, closer to memory or testimony than conventional pictorial narrative.

The Kashmir Valley has been a recurring subject since the early 2000s. Sheikh approaches the region through its cultural history as well as conflict and displacement, using literary and historical sources to connect individual lives with larger political forces. MoMA frames that practice around the artist’s idea that an artist must bear witness to both past and present.

That makes the exhibition notable beyond the milestone of a New York solo debut. Sheikh belongs to a generation of Indian artists whose work complicates the familiar Western story of postwar and contemporary art. Her paintings move between local traditions and international modernism without treating either as a fixed category.

The show also arrives at a moment when museums are paying closer attention to the ways history is carried through forms that sit outside the conventional monumental painting. Sheikh’s use of scrolls, screens, repeated motifs and text asks viewers to read as much as look. A work can unfold spatially while also moving through time.

That pace should suit the first-floor galleries at MoMA. This is not an exhibition that depends on a single famous object or an instantly recognizable image. Its argument accumulates through repetition: borders, landscapes, figures, patterns and words returning in altered contexts.

For New York audiences unfamiliar with Sheikh, the useful entry point is not to treat the paintings as illustrations of Kashmir or South Asian history. They are built around the instability of telling history at all. Personal memory, public violence, literature and inherited visual forms occupy the same surface, sometimes reinforcing one another and sometimes refusing to line up neatly.

The exhibition is also a chance to see recent work in conversation with Sheikh’s longer practice. MoMA lists Home, Land 4, a 2025 mixed-tempera work on Sanganer paper, among the works associated with the show. The materials themselves are part of the story: paper, pigment and pattern carry histories alongside the images painted on them.

Fractured Skies opens Sunday, Sept. 27, on MoMA’s first floor. A member program with Sheikh and the exhibition’s curators is scheduled for Sept. 29.

MoMA has exhibition and visitor details.