Modernist painter Manu Parekh captures the chaos and harmony of life in his latest works

Manu Parekh's vibrant memories of Kolkata and artistic journey are showcased in Flower Sutra exhibition at Nature Morte, New Delhi.

Manu Parekh’s memories of Kolkata, a city where he spent a decade of his life, are vivid and imbued with a sense of nostalgia. It is here that the renowned artist worked in the field of textiles under the tutelage of cultural activist Pupul Jayakar.

The city, where order reigns within chaos, was a constant reminder that it is possible for dualities to exist together. A talisman on the arm of a well-suited person or managing to get yourself a window seat on a bus, while having to hold a standing fellow passenger’s bag and tiffin box, is where he saw these contrasts come together in harmony. “Life is in between these contradictions,” he says.

Perhaps that is the reason the modernist painter has often channelled those tensions into compositions that pulse with rhythm and contrast. And he continues to do so with his latest body of work — Flower Sutra at Nature Morte’s gallery at The Dhan Mill in New Delhi — an exhibition of his paintings which have been in the making for the past few years. Using acrylic on canvas, Parekh paints in layers that build upon each other, thick impasto meets delicate washes, jagged lines cut through fluid colour, creating a surface that hums with spontaneity and intention.

There is a restless depth in the movement of the brushstrokes, almost as if they are a reflection of his mind. “I call it the experience of life,” says the Padma Shri-awardee, who has lived and worked in many places including Ahmedabad, Kolkata, and Delhi. “My work also took me to many villages and small towns of India, where I worked at the grassroot level. There is a different India in those villages,” says the 86-year-old artist. 

Perhaps most noted for his Banaras series — which emerged from the impact the holy city had on him when he visited it for the first time in 1980 and since then, has visited “more than 100 times” — these paintings also carry forward motifs from his earlier works.

“There are two things in Banaras — faith and flowers,” the artist is fond of saying. In Banaras, walking from one ghat to another, he witnessed marriages (symbolising new life) and death within a few kilometres. “I witnessed a priest doing a mundan of some people. There was wisdom on their faces — as if they knew that they have been born, and they will die here and this is where they need to be in the interim. It is faith that keeps us going. What else does a common man have but faith to sustain him,” he questions.

As for the flowers, which he paints with bold, prominent moves, the artist finds a human element in them. “Someday, they are placed on God’s heads, and the next day after the puja, they are removed. Some fall on the ground and are trampled upon. I find the journey of flowers very interesting…” he ponders, before adding that for him, it is the human element which draws him in. “The human is neither God nor demon. He is somewhere in between. Kolkata, where I spent ten years of my life, is a sea of human beings — where life keeps happening in spite of contrasts and contradictions, the undercurrent of order in the chaos…” he introspects, coming back full circle to one of his lifelong engagements with dualities.