Madhvi Parekh: The Folk Modernist

THE DAY WE are scheduled to meet for a photoshoot in DAG, Delhi, where Madhvi Parekh’s solo exhibition, Remembered Tales, is tak­ing place, our meeting is cancelled due to a hoax bomb threat targeting Delhi’s museums and galleries. But Parekh, whom I have met in her charming residence in Chittaranjan Park before for interviews, continues to have her be­atific smile intact. It’s a smile that rarely leaves her glowing face, no matter what circumstances are thrown in the way of this octogenarian artist. There’s a quiet resilience about Parekh that informs not just her personality but also the artistic practice of this self-taught painter.

Ask Parekh to describe her work and she simply says: “Why ask me? Mainey banaa diya (I have made it), now it’s up to you to interpret it. Once I’ve created, it’s done. I have moved on.” But take a look at the gallery that’s displayed 20-plus of her works, commissioned by DAG especially for the show, and you know that you’re looking at an artist whose language continues to fearlessly evolve, stemming from childhood memories of her village; the baharupiyas, the inter­twining lives of humans and animals, mostly projected as fantastical beings in a world born from Parekh’s imagination.

According to DAG’s CEO and MD Ashish Anand, Parekh’s work is at once primitive and sophisticated, familiar and other-worldly, playful and thought­ful, indigenous and universal. Writing in the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue, Anand notes: “I saw how Westerners unfamiliar with her lan­guage reacted when they viewed it and knew that the universality of its appeal lay in its folk imagery, even though it did not align with any known folk or tribal art form here or elsewhere.”

The “universality” and timelessness of her art is such that in 2022 some of her works, along with her husband Manu Parekh’s, were especially recreated as monumental tapestries and used as a fitting backdrop for Christian Dior’s show at Paris Haute Couture week.

In 2017, DAG held a retrospective of Parekh, which was successful, and subsequently it travelled to Mumbai and New York, where the gallery continues to maintain a strong presence. According to Anand, it was the first time he sensed that the artist’s currency was on the rise, especially given the excitement about her art among various stakeholders.

“Mujhe jo kehna tha, mainey paintings ke zariye keh diya (I have said what I had to say through my paintings),” Parekh says when I ask her how she thinks she’s evolved as an artist. But she turns the question to me, inquiring about my family. She asks about the juggle between my home and work commitments. She would know. She married artist Manu Parekh at a young age. He became not only her spouse but also her mentor, guide and friend. Parekh started drawing out of boredom when the couple lived in Mumbai after marriage. Studying to be­come a Montessori school teacher, Parekh was homebound while expecting her first child and took to drawing. Her husband, a staunch supporter of his wife’s talent, was the first person to recognise her skills. “She had a strong command of line and form,” he says. Bringing home Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, he encouraged her to draw from it, convinced that the world needed to watch out for her as the artist. “Jamini Roy was the only folk modernist till then, and there was no one else who had filled that gap. I looked at Madhvi’s work and thought she could do it. She could be the artist to take that conversa­tion forward through her art,” says Manu.

Rebecca Brown from the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, who has written in the current exhibition’s catalogue, notes that in many of her sketches, Parekh often returns to a composite figure, or a figure with figures inside it. Brown notes that the core of Parekh’s practice is rooted in daily repeti­tion, of tending an aesthetic sensibility through drawing, of not letting the mind or a hand be idle, and instead embracing the daily rhythm of cooking, cleaning, drawing, painting. “Honouring that cycle is truly at the core of her artistic creation,” says Brown.

A QUICK LOOK AT the remark­ably curated exhibition shows us that behind the colourful, variously sized canvases, Parekh’s work is informed by memory, her years in Sanjaya, a village in Gujarat, where she grew up in the 1940s and ’50s. As a child, she was a self-confessed tomboy, playing with other children. She recalls, “Main apne aankh aur kaan kholkar rakhti thi and sab dekhti aur sunti thi (I kept my eyes and ears open, observed everything around me),” she says. It’s that memory that’s brought alive on the canvases even today when she paints. Parekh conjures not just her childhood days but also memories of folk tales and local myths, evoking nostalgia through her fantastical paintings. On her part, she says that drawing, particularly, gives her a sense of freedom, and it’s that freedom which she explores in her art. “Drawing allows me to get over my fears,” she says, explaining that many of the figures in her larger-than-life canvases come alive because she’s sketched them carefully in her drawing books on a smaller scale. “Choti cheez ko kabhi chota mat samjho (don’t think of anything as small),” says Parekh while showing me one of her tiny sketchbooks in which she’s drawn many figures such as Christ, Durga, and various other fantastical creatures that ultimately reappear in her larger paintings.

“Everything coexists in my art,” says Parekh, adding, “when we were growing up, animals, birds, human be­ings, all of us lived together, we were all intertwined.”

Goddess Durga (2023), for instance, is a good example of seeing “the impor­tance of animal-human relationship” as she calls it. The acrylic work has a frame that’s painted along the central figure of the goddess and other elements: centipede-like human figure, a snake-like figure with two heads on either side that resemble human faces; another figure that resembles a water pot, besides other beastly figures that don’t aim to scare, they seem to live harmlessly in the frame. Although not directly connected, all the figures come together to create balance in the overall painting.

But ask her to explain her art, and you can see that she’d prefer to retreat into the kitchen, where she makes delicious cups of masala tea with snacks and meals that are nutritious, simple, and finger-licking good.

“Her studio has always been next to the kitchen,” says Manu, adding, “Madhvi always says that cooking and painting are the same thing. She does not want to leave her personal life behind. There is a here-and-now reality as well as a level of fantasy in her work, all rooted in inspiration from folk and rural sources.”

On her part, Parekh feels that do­mesticity and creativity are interlinked. “Sometimes I stare at a blank canvas, nothing comes to my mind. It doesn’t agitate me. I go about doing things at home—cooking, cleaning, kitchen work, housework—and come back to my studio and then it’s easier to paint. It helps,” she says. Parekh reminds me of Julia Cameron’s exercises in The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity where the author encourages housework and decluttering as an intrinsic part of unleashing creativity within us.

“If I prepare something for you to eat, and if the dish requires tempering, I can­not skip the step if I want the dish to be complete,” explains Parekh, adding, “it’s the same with painting. I have to create it and finish it thoroughly.” In Parekh’s view, both cooking and painting are forms of art. Both require patience, skill, and the power of repetition. I can’t help but think of her as a musician approach­ing a raag, wherein the artist keeps experimenting but continually returns to repeating specific phrases that give the raag its definitive structure, yet sings them in a manner that’s personal.

IN THE NEARLY six decades of her artistic practice, Parekh, on the face of it, has painted in a style that’s uniquely her own. In her work, fish can fly, birds swim under­water, and even a human figure bears wings. Her paintings feature figures that seem familiar upon initial viewing, but upon closer inspection, you’ll find the resemblance ends there. Yes, there’s apnapan (acceptance through familiar­ity), but look closely, and features of a human figure are drawn from a differ­ent thought process, perhaps a myth or a memory.

“I don’t know how to sit idle,” says Parekh, a reason why she’ll always have a pen and notebook with her. She says it’s her father who taught her the value of time. “He never liked us to sit idle, and always asked us to help my mother. My hands were always busy, whether knitting, doing crochet, peeling vegetables in the kitchen to help my mother, cleaning…” says Parekh. That habit continues to be an important part of her personality.

Whether she is at an airport, her home, or hotel rooms, she opens her sketchbook and keeps creating. It’s fascinating to see how many of her figures, first sketched in notebooks, get translated onto giant canvases. The figure of Jesus, for instance, as seen in The Last Supper, a series of paintings and serigraphs, was initially drawn in sketchbooks before being incorporated into significant works of art.

For a woman in her 80s, battling various ailments, it’s still remarkable to see her spirit remain unbroken. I ask how she reacts to her art being described as one offering a strong feminist stance in the primitivist trope? Parekh firmly refuses to be tied down to these tags. “I don’t listen to what people say about me, how they tag me as any kind of an artist,” she says vehemently. There will be as many opinions as there are people. “Main jo hun, wahi hun. Main bas paint karke dikhati hun, aur kuch nahi (I am what I am. I only paint and show, there’s nothing more to me).”

(Remembered Tales by Madhvi Parekh is on display at DAG, Delhi till August 23)

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