Madhvi Parekh

One of India’s most distinctive artistic voices, Madhvi Parekh (b. 1942) has spent over six decades developing a practice entirely her own—independent of movements, trends or schools. A self-taught artist, her work is rooted in personal memory, folklore and an imaginative inner world shaped by her childhood in Sanjaya, Gujarat.

Madhvi Parekh: Remembered Tales showcases a fresh, never-before-seen body of work that reaffirms the artist’s pioneering role in shaping a unique idiom of modernism. The exhibition takes its name from Parekh’s lifelong habit of drawing—her sketchbooks, filled with spontaneous images and everyday details, inspired many of these new paintings. In revisiting them, Parekh finds not repetition but renewal. They speak to the rhythms of daily life—where her art remains inseparable from the domestic realm. For Parekh, no object or detail is too small, reflecting the quiet introspection that defines her artistic practice.

The figures, motifs and fantastical landscapes in these new paintings recall her established vocabulary but reappear in altered, layered ways. In some works, she returns to techniques from the 1970s, such as textured backgrounds evoking village mud walls; in others, she combines images from across her practice into compositions that feel both familiar and new.

Over the years, Parekh’s art has gained recognition—in India and abroad. Her acquisition by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inclusion in Christian Dior’s Paris show in 2022 and a collateral presentation at the 2024 Venice Biennale mark her growing international presence. Yet, at heart, her work remains grounded in her village and fabular imagination. Remembered Tales brings together the inner and outer journeys of an artist who continues to explore, transform and enchant—on her own terms.