Huge canvases adorn the walls of the gallery at the alipore Museum that one can instantly relate as similar to the folk art forms from across the country. These paintings by Madhvi Parekh are neither just another well-known folk form, nor much different from it, making them her unique and easily recognisable style. curated by dag and titled Madhvi Parekh: A Life in Line, Memory and Myth, this exhibition spotlights her unique style and how it evolves over her career of six decades while keeping the lines true all along.
With the exhibition opening in Kolkata, her creative journey attains a full circle, because it is in this city that her journey kicked off in the early 1960s. In fact, while browsing the paintings, the evolution is palpable. While her early works have notable imprints of abstractionism, her later works are more symbolic and figurative.
Madhvi was born in a village in gujarat and has been a self-taught artist. In fact, her body of work called A travelling circus in my village is directly reflective of not only elements drawn from observation but also lines that tell a tale of village art through its distinctive strokes. Her creativity emerges mostly through everyday happenings and personal memories, which make it Artworks by Madhvi Parekh unique. often, throughout the exhibition, one may come face to face with motifs and figures that seem similar or repetitive. This is because while in her early works she discovered through her paintings, the more recent body of works tries to re-visualise the same in newer forms or evolving creativity. Most of her pictorial elements are humans, birds, mythical figures, and animals — all peacefully co-existing. Moreover, her canvases also portray an emphasis on sketching, and dag displays some of her sketchbooks, where all that is around in the gallery once took shape in blank pages. as you pass by each sketchbook, you familiarise yourself with the way her art evolved and how memories and observation played a crucial role in bringing it alive on the canvas.
Madhvi Parekh is one of the foremost woman painters of our times whose works cannot be ‘boxed’ or differentiated on the basis of gender. While it portrays the same rawness and primitive energy as modern folk art, it is, in reality, not entirely so, which makes it difficult to be categorised. Thus, it is best to describe her art form as one with a sense of humanitarianism, environmental inclusion, and memory.
Further, her praise is not limited to India alone. apart from international galleries acquiring her work, they were also a part of the christian dior 2022 presentation, and a collateral show in the Venice Biennale in 2024 marked her global fame. Hence, it can be safe to say that her art is rooted in India with a global appeal.
The exhibition is on at Alipore Museum till August 2.
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