As an artist Manu Parekhs career has shown a diverse section of form and material. Parekh formed his career after independence in an India that reflected great divisions and confluences as well as a tryst with numerous tragedies and he sought his solace in the metaphysical, much like the millions of Indians who followed similar paths to explain complex lives.

Manu Parekh’s canvases consume colour, space and figuration, flowers turn into human heads that can inhabit a canvas like a temple dome dominates the landscape of Benaras. For Parekh his native Ahmedabad, his city of awakening Bombay, his muse Kolkata, and Delhi where he resides, all come together in Benaras.  Each can claim the city and also not be part of it.  As a city of convergence and great divide, it is becoming a muse that Parekh has pursued for more than three decades.  An artist who draws from spirituality, its ritual and inherent modern exploration and form and medium, his culmination with Benaras is natural.

It is here that he witnesses an absurd architectural scape on the banks of the rivers, minarets, temples and palaces jostled with each other, on the banks where people wash, bathe, cremate corpses and offered aratis and lights to the river.  Parekh watching the maze and chaos Benaras offered the bereaved cremating their loved ones alongside the enthusiastic pilgrim commissioning a ritual through a priest, decided he would paint this city.  This resulted in a vast body of works and the inspiration that emanated from the orange hues of the setting sun on the glistening waters of the Ganges, never lost its fascination for him. Portraits of mourners in Benaras, the common man, and other heads describe the emotions we gather in the same perspective, like a miniature painting in the same moment and time.

Manubhai’s use of animals corresponds to times of violence, as animal head approaches a plant, that may be devoured or he superimposes these heads onto portraits that resemble humans with great affinity and despise.  He also decides to draw a still life of a flower vase in a Benaras Landscape, or offerings of orchids and a lamp that are set amidst a landscape.  We must regather his early watercolours where simple lines abstracted faces, these flower studies are similar to portrait studies, often resembling humans where the flowers replace hair-dos.

The Flower Vase gives away to a portrait of Francis Newton Souza.  Parekh’s anoints the iconoclast Souza with sainthood, Souza held much disdain with the clergy, but much admiration among artists.  His ‘ Poet’ resembles MF Hussain and his various appearances but we are unsure. Parekh draw vibrant lines between Gandhi’s belief in non-violence and a landscape of pain.

The year he went back to Madhubani in the 1980s, the Bhagalpur blindings happened where 31 under trials   where blinded by police as a form of justice but also in the most inhuman manner.  Parekh protested with a series of heads termed ‘Man Made Blinding 1981’ ‘ Man-Made Blindness 1990’ ,  ‘Man-Made Suffering III 1990’  ‘Looking Beyond’ 1990 and many portraits of what could have been the faces of the prisoners who had been blinded.

From 1982 a portrait of woman in Black with a black horizon perhaps is the portrait of the Dusadh artist Shanti Devi Paswan, it was here Parekh was committing himself to their upliftment through art he names it ‘Offering’ 1982.

His latest series comes back to a rendition of the ’Last Supper’ from 2017 that depicts the caricatures of men in varied emotions.  His bronze casts from 2006 take elements of aesthetics from vernacular folk forms from Bastar, Chattisgarh.  Parekh is best defined with a conscious versatility in his practice that is erratic but interesting.

At the National Gallery of Modern Art, Manubhais audience will be composed by the collecting elite and thousands who are dropped to its doors each day by bus tour operators who bring day tourists from rural India excited to visit the city, but each one of them will find a resonance in the life of the artist who paints all of our visions onto the canvas.

Parekh in his narrative tells us about an extraordinary life told in the most quotidian manner.  Among the painters of India, he binds us as the very many who seek through art.
Sumesh Sharma
Bombay 2018

Sumesh Sharma (1983) is an artist, curator & writer. He co-founded the Clark House Initiative, Bombay in 2010.  His practice is informed by alternate art histories that often include cultural perspectives informed by socio-economics and politics. Immigrant Culture in the Francophone, Vernacular Equalities of Modernism, Movements of Black Consciousness in Culture are his areas of interest.