Manu Parekh: Benaras and Beyond
By Tripat K Kalra | Published on Mar 27, 2023 | in Contemporary Art
“There is a level of spirituality in painting, isn’t there?
It’s like chanting a mantra, sitting for hours to put the paint on canvas.
There is a spiritual satisfaction in the repetition.”
— Manu Parekh
One of the oldest living cities in the world, Banares (or Varanasi) looks enchanting when one see the myriad of temples and ghats from a boat. It was on a boat ride, one evening in 1979, that artist Manu Parekh got mesmerised by this holy city. “I saw the play of the god-made light from the sky and the man-made light from the temple, and in between there were moving shadows of different colours, like in a theatre,” Parekh says. The magical moment marked the beginning of a long relationship between the artist and his muse. His paintings seem to capture the city as if he’s viewing it from a boat, with temples and buildings along the banks, its inner sanctum becoming a theatrical stage with its play of light.
Kolkata was Parekh’s muse for the 10 years that he lived in that city (1965-75). But his fascination with the pilgrim city of Varanasi has spanned three decades. He first visited it in the 1980s, and it inspired a large body of works nicknamed the Banaras series. In them, he paints teeming ghats and temple spires set against the orange hues of sunsets and cobalt blue skies. “Till date, I’m not bored of painting a Banaras landscape,” he says. “It’s a city full of energy where you can witness life and death together.”
This city was, for him, an everlasting source of inspiration. Says Parekh: “The drama of life, both mundane and sublime, is played out daily on the teeming ghats and the narrow lanes of one of the world’s oldest living cities… In its many-layered, thickly textured reality, all contradictions are resolved. The city of light is a vast, crowded landscape where I don’t feel small, I become part of the universe; I become vast, yet humble. The days run but I become still.”
“I am interested in its rituals and notions of fertility and celebration,” Parekh adds. Drama is also present in the way he portrays flowers as formidable characters that often loom larger than the landscape.
Manu Parekh is undoubtedly one of India’s most inventive painters. His early work explored the relationship between man and nature, which according to him was an energetic link that had to be celebrated. Since then, contradictions have formed the basis of his artistic practice, no matter the subject or genre of his works. Polemics have always intrigued Manu Parekh – the energy of the organic form and the inherent sexuality within these forms are intangible elements in his works. His paintings provoke viewers to take notice of the world around them through the emotion, pain and anguish expressed in the subjects of his paintings. His colours and forms exude a volatile energy that can barely be contained within the confines of the canvas, and have become an extension of his personality.
“Parekh’s paintings break all the rules, sometimes reducing riotous colours to black and white, or making a city on a river plain into a kind of mountain…[He] is the foremost expressionist in contemporary Indian painting,” comments John T. Spike, Director of the Florence International Biennale of Contemporary Art.
Parekh was born (1939) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Under the training of Mukund Shroff, he obtained a Diploma in Drawing and Painting from Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, in 1962. Later he also had a short stint at the National School of Drama (NSD). Starting his career in the theatre, he worked as an actor and stage designer for one year and joined Weavers’ Service Centre, Mumbai, of Pupul Jayakar as art designer in 1963 where he stayed for two years. Between 1965 and 1975 he lived in Kolkata, where he met and established lasting friendships with the writer Shakti Chattopadhyaya and Subhash Mukhopadhyaya; the artists Somnath Here, Jogen Chowdhury, Ganesh Pyne and Shyammal Dutta Ray. In 1975 Parekh shifted to New Delhi, joining Handicrafts and Handlooms Export Corporation of India as a Design Consultant. He left the corporation later to pursue his career as a freelance artist.
Parekh has had several group exhibitions and the Modern Painting exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in 1982, Hirschhom Muse exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC the same year and the travelling exhibition, Seven Artists are some of the notable ones. Apart from the solo shows at Bose Pacia Modern in New York and at ARKS Gallery in London, Small Drawings at Sophia Duchesne Art Gallery, Mumbai in 1991, Ritual Oblations at Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi in 1999, Portraits of Flower and Landscapes of River at Jehangir Art Gallery and Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 2003, Banaras at Vadehra Art Gallery, in 2004 and Banaras – Eternity Watches Time at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 2007 were the notable among his solo exhibitions. He has participated in two Triennales in India in 1975 and 1978 and HelpAge India has utilised his works for mobilising funds by presenting them at auctions at Sotheby’s, Bombay in 1989 and Andasprey (UK) in 1991.
Parekh has served as the Exhibition Commissioner for Madhubani Painting show in Italy and Denmark and Contemporary Indian Painting at the Festival of India at Stockholm in 1987. After the Birla Academy of Art and Culture award of 1971, he received the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIFACS) award and the Silver Plaque of the President of India in 1972. AIFACS award came his way once more in 1974 and in 1982, he received the National Art Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi. Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Calcutta, honoured him again in 1991 and in the same year Parekh was honoured with a Padma Sri by the Government of India.
The artist lives and works in Delhi.
References
Shweta Upadhyay, Mint
https://www.livemint.com/news/business-of-life/an-artist-s-impression-of-varanasi-1541928357462.html
Rajeev Lochan
https://www.hindustantimes.com/art-and-culture/an-artists-meet-manu-parekh-in-conversation-with-ranjeev-lochan/story-ESH212Zjy2fqUKE7iim6YK.html
Manu Parekh, Manu Parekh: Sixty Years of Selected Works, Aleph Books.