Happy in the Green Field

With the recent international success of Madhvi Parekh’s art—global fashion house Dior used art works by the artist and her husband Manu Parekh as tapestries at its Spring/Summer 2022 showcase in Paris last year—its endearing quality has come to be studied with greater serious academic lens, catapulting her to the top of current Indian modernists who have successfully forged an amalgam of indigenist and modernist vocabulary in their work. While the evident narrative of an idyllic, long-lost time in her native village of Sanjaya in Gujarat makes it charming, it’s the successful expression of a primitivist vocabulary in controlled strokes and composition that makes it an emphatic work of modern art.