One of Parekh's works.
Credit: DAG
One of India’s most distinctive artistic voices, Madhvi Parekh, is having a special solo show of her unique body of newly completed works at the DAG gallery in New Delhi. Created post-Covid, ‘Remembered Tales’ is encyclopaedic and celebrates Parekh’s enduring ability to turn remembered experiences into richly imaginative worlds that speak across time and place. A pioneering voice in the language of folk modernism and informed by her lifelong habit of spontaneous drawings, sketches and everyday observations, her show includes several large-format canvases.
Some of the major influences in Parekh’s art have been her childhood, women’s craft, folk art and Indian myths. Madhvi grew up in Sanjaya, Gujarat, with a father who was a Gandhian and who taught her the value of discipline. “I was an observant child, and so everything we learned as children — making rangolis, doing embroideries, watching the easy affection between people and animals in village life — formed my foundational memory,” she recalled. Later, when she married acclaimed artist Manu Parekh, she was exposed to formal art at galleries in Mumbai, Kolkata and New Delhi. In her travels around the world, she saw works by Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Matisse, Picasso, and van Gogh, whom she greatly admired. “I did not want to be like any of them, but I hoped my art too would have its independent identity,” she explained.
Even though she did not go to an art school, Parekh’s husband had the confidence to mentor her, while retaining her style and language of work. Given that her husband’s style is very different from hers makes for interesting discussions between them. “He was happy to guide me, but let me develop independently. He encouraged me at every turn and was overjoyed with every little success,” she said. Parekh began sketching ever since her husband presented her with a copy of Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, and she has never travelled without her drawing books. The exhibition also displays for the first time her rare original sketchbooks from 1978 to 2018 as a three-volume set. “These drawing books are my grammar and my picture board, and the images are part of my painting compositions,” she added.
A spontaneous painter, Parekh never knows what she is going to draw or paint when she sits before an empty canvas.
“I begin with my brush dipped in black paint — always — and let the line form its own magical images. I have a sense of joy about what will appear next, and this playfulness is part of my practice,” she said. As an expectant and young mother, her world revolved around her children. “I saw everything bursting with life. I built imaginary fantastical worlds for them with toys, birds, animals and figures within figures. There was a sense of curiosity and joy that I hoped would saturate my art, and in that sense, my paintings were about the environment and how everything that happens in nature is organic,” said Parekh.
Apart from folk motifs, legends and figures, Parekh also uses imaginary characters in figurative and abstracted orientations in her compositions. In many of her works, she utilises the settings of Indian textile printing traditions such as Kalamkari and Pichwai, where she enshrines the main character of the composition in the centre and fills the minor or secondary ones in the borders.
Over the years, Parekh’s art has gained recognition in India and abroad. A documentary film on Madhvi and her husband, Dwitya, was made by Suraj Purohit in 1992. Previously, DAG has shown Parekh’s work at major exhibitions around the world, and has also featured her in books published in India and abroad. A major retrospective exhibition, ‘The Curious Seeker’ organised by DAG, opened in New Delhi in 2017 and travelled to Mumbai, Ahmedabad and New York to critical acclaim. Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi has since acquired a sizeable collection of her work.
Further, her acquisition by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inclusion in Christian Dior’s Paris show in 2022 and a collateral presentation at the 2024 Venice Biennale mark her growing international presence. “Unapologetically different from other artists, Madhvi Parekh’s work stands etymologically apart — not quite ‘modern’ as most viewers see it, and not quite folk. It is this quality of rawness that has convinced me of her importance to the Indian art world,” said Ashish Anand, CEO and Managing Director, DAG.
‘Remembered Tales’ will be on display at DAG, New Delhi, till August 23.