Portraits of Sikh Gurus painted by Sobha Singh became iconic from the ’70s onward in Sikh households around the globe. Sobha Singh was commissioned by the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) in either the 1950s or the ’60s to create these images. These paintings by Sobha Singh have created an indelible image in our minds of the Sikh Gurus. We no longer need to imagine what they might have looked like; they exist in our mind’s eye. Earlier renderings would have been made in folk styles. The most common would have been Persian miniature painting, a style that creates a flat two-dimensional image. Anand's work captures intimate familial spaces where these portraits hang in diasporic homes and includes printed matter and lenticular prints that interrogate these histories.
