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Madhvi Parekh: A Life in Line, Memory and Myth

Madhvi Parekh: A Life in Line, Memory and Myth

Madhvi Parekh: A Life in Line, Memory and Myth

Madhvi Parekh: A Life in Line, Memory and Myth - DAG World

Madhvi Parekh: A Life in Line, Memory and Myth

THE ALIPORE MUSEUM

Kolkata, 15 May - 2 August 2026

An exhibition by DAG in collaboration with The Alipore Museum

Madhvi Parekh

Two Scarecrow in my Rice Field

Acrylic on canvas, 2024

About The Exhibition Publications Partners

Bringing together works that span almost six decades, this exhibition offers a nuanced view of Madhvi Parekh’s remarkable artistic journey—one that has unfolded with quiet conviction, independent of dominant movements or stylistic prescriptions. From her early drawings and paintings of the 1960s, where the influence of Paul Klee’s abstraction is discernible, to her most recent body of work exhibited by DAG in 2025, the exhibition traces a practice anchored in memory and imagination while also marking her return to Kolkata—the city where her artistic journey began.

Born in a village in Gujarat and largely self-taught, Parekh’s artistic language emerges from an intimate engagement with folklore, domestic life and the rhythms of her surroundings. Over time, her practice gave birth to a distinctive visual vocabulary—where hybrid figures—human, animal and mythical—coexist in flattened, dreamlike spaces.

While her early works reveal a process of discovery, her later paintings demonstrate a confident return to—and reinvention of—her own motifs, often drawing from her lifelong habit of sketching. The exhibition foregrounds this continuity: the persistence of a singular vision even as her practice evolves. In her later works, familiar figures and landscapes reappear, layered and reconfigured; however, rather than looking back nostalgically, they extend her visual language into new, exploratory directions.

Over the years, Parekh’s art has gained recognition both in India and abroad. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s acquisition of her work, its inclusion in Christian Dior’s Paris presentation in 2022, and a collateral showing at the Venice Biennale 2024 mark her expanding international presence. Yet, at heart, her work remains grounded in her village and fabular imagination. Situated within this global context, the exhibition affirms Parekh’s position within the larger narrative of Indian modernism—as a pioneering figure who has forged a deeply personal idiom while remaining true to her roots.

Spanning over five decades, Madhvi Parekh’s sketchbooks offer a rare, intimate glimpse into the inner workings of her imagination. These are not preparatory studies for larger works, but visual diaries—spaces of reflection, repetition, and reinvention.

Across these pages, a recurring table or grocery list hints at daily life; a figure within a figure evokes motherhood; and birds, ladders, and other motifs signal longing, play and possibility. The sketchbooks are also where the self-taught artist schooled herself—drawing from sources like Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook and exploring how a single line or dot could create a world.

The drawings, doodles and spontaneous impressions—recorded in sketchbooks over the years from the 1978 to 2018—reveal, in their informality, the persistence, instinct and curiosity that shaped her distinctive practice.

By displaying them here, we honour the often-invisible processes behind artistic creation. For Madhvi, no detail was ever too small—and in these pages, we see the origins of her singular visual language.

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