Madhvi Parekh: When worlds collide

Madhvi Parekh, 83, who is showing her new works in Delhi, collapses time frames and geographies with ease and harmony

- Avantika Bhuyan

At DAG, Delhi, an exhibition of paintings offers insight into artist Madhvi Parekh's prowess as a storyteller. The solo presentation, Madhvi Parekh: Remembered Tales, features a set of newly completed works by the 83-year-old artist. Canvases often feature narratives nestled within one another.

In Goddess of My Village, an acrylic on canvas (2023), two heads appear to be connected by a tapering tubular form. This slender conduit, of sorts, contains smaller figures—plants, fish, fantastical organisms—creating a world within a world. You could assume that the two connected figures have subsumed these smaller creatures, or that their overall persona is the sum of all these little beings. The painting also features deities within temples, anthropomorphic creatures with human heads and piscine bodies, totem-like structures, and more.

In another part of the gallery, another set of stories unfurls within Pond in my Village (2024). The scene seems to be set in some surrealistic realm, where the city and the village, the real and the dreamlike come together. Parekh populates her worlds with patterns, dots, dashes, embroidery-like textures, hybrid beings, and leaves their interpretation to the viewer.

I meet Parekh at her home in Delhi's Chittaranjan Park in between spells of rain. The self-taught artist is a reluctant conversationalist, but her paintings speak a great deal on her behalf. In her creations, time frames collapse into one another; the past exists with the present. She brings scenes from the city and her memories of growing up in the village of Sanjaya, Gujarat, together in a single canvas with ease. The bird or