NEW DELHI: As a teenager, Madhvi Parekh never thought she could ever become an artist.
That is, until one day, her artist husband Manu Parekh introduced her to German Expressionist Paul Klee’s style of painting.
Then, a student of Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai, he asked her to draw circles, squares and triangles. And Madhvi, who was only 15 when she got married, has not looked back since.
The squares and triangles and circles began taking shape of a moon, a tree, a hut, and soon life was mushrooming around them on the canvas.
A collection of the 76-year-old artist’s works created during her five-decade-long career is being showcased as part of a retrospective, “The Curious Seeker”, at DAG Kala Ghoda in Mumbai.
The show, featuring iconic works representative of every decade of her career, aims to create a dialogue to understand, contextualise and place her contribution within the larger context of Indian modern art.
A self-taught artist, Madhvi chose to represent a theme that was most easily accessible to her — village life — and went on to paint vividly the milieu she grew up in.
“My paintings are inspired by my life. The memories from of my life in Sanjaya village in Gujarat, where I was born, were all in my head and I painted them on a canvas,” she said.
Cows lapping water from a pond, men playing with kids, cots and colourful kites are some images that can be found in her multi-hued artworks that tell a story of their own.
In the years that followed, she went on to make oil on canvas paintings, reverse paintings, serigraphs and etchings as well as drawings using everything from glitter pens to brush and ink on an art paper.
For the Delhi-based Madhvi, her art imitated her life. Subsequently, her influences altered as she travelled.
The urban centres of Mumbai, Kolkata and New Delhi, where she lived after her marriage, and the art camps at Kasauli, where she was invited and exposed to the Weavers Service Centre, all find place in her works.
But it was her trip to Israel that gave her her second muse — Jesus.
“When I travelled to Israel, the image of Jesus attracted me…I was inspired by Christianity and that is how I started illustrating him,” Madhvi said.
In quintessential Madhvi Parekh style, she recreated biblical events like the Noah’s Ark, and The Last Supper. Several churches she visited in Israel also filtered into her works.
Having stamped her presence as one of the leading women artists in the contemporary Indian art scene, Madhvi hopes to continue to be surrounded by art and creating more of it.
“One thing I am certain of is I will always be an artist and will keep inspiring other emerging artists along the way,” she said.
The retrospective will come to a close on October 27. (AGENCIES)
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