Worth a read!
An artist life exists apart from and way beyond a single catalogue or show. Books based on an artist’s works and rarely those on the life of the artist go far in preserving his or her artistic legacy. The odd epiphanous text may even succeed in demystifying the creative process itself.
Madhvi Parekh: A world of Memories published by Penguin Studio is one such effort. The book provides an overview of her oeuvre and also a glimpse into her personal history; the story of her marriage with, and tutelage under artist husband Manu Parekh. A partnership that impelled her to the world of contemporary Indian art.
Her art and creative process is unique, in that Madhvi ‘s paintings are informed completely by the rural ‘folk - tribal’ idiom. Her figures, landscape and colours are taken from wall paintings and floor designs found on the houses in Gujarat. However, the treatment, concerns and compositions are often startlingly contemporary in their imagination and impact. Her treatment is distinct as she did not either enter this world through trained contemporary art practice that consciously and deliberately adopts and adapts transformed tribal motifs into his or her art as an ideological statement, or as tribal artists whose visual language grapples with modernity. In her case crisis of a fractured identity and urban-rural duality identity is creatively resolved in her works.
Devices and motifs borrowed from mythologies derived from religious systems such as the Goddess defeating sundry demons people her painting. However before the viewer becomes complacent in familiarity, the symbols meander into another imagined space that belongs entirely to the artist.
Imaginative hybrid creatures inhabit her canvases form part of larger narratives that are very important in her works and this comes across in her work. Her paintings have a near epic sweep and at the macro level seeks to depict a cosmic vision. The artist, however, also pays attention to details exemplified at the micro level in faces painted in her distinctive style, yet each visag is being individuated.
Though the book lacks a cogent chronological narrative, it is is very well produced.
— The writer is an art
historian, curator and critic
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