Madhvi Parekh Remembered Tales

Following her acclaimed retrospective in 2017, DAG is pleased to announce Madhvi Parekh: Remembered Tales, a special showing of a unique body of newly completed works by the artist, one of India’s most distinctive artistic voices. Reaffirming her pioneering voice in the language of folk modernism, this exhibition celebrates Parekh’s enduring ability to turn remembered experiences into richly imaginative worlds that speak across time and place. Monumental in both subject and scale and informed by her lifelong habit of spontaneous drawings and everyday observations, captured in decades of sketchbooks, Remembered Tales includes several large-format canvases, establishing the artist's ability and control over her medium. Opened on 11 July 2025 at DAG, New Delhi, the exhibition will remain on display until 23 August 2025. 

Inspired by both village art and a modernist vocabulary but belonging to neither, Madhvi Parekh’s works explore relationships between people as well as their environment, emerging from her interest in art when she was pregnant with her first child. Her practice, over a long career, has remained deeply intertwined with her bucolic upbringing and the memories she retains of her idyllic childhood. Through this sustained engagement, she has carved a niche for herself in the world of modern art, becoming a pioneering figure in folk modernism. Her canvases often resemble dreamscapes or can be called playgrounds of imagination, suspending ideals of scale and perspective, and reflecting her free-spirited approach to painting and life. 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.

Together with the paintings, on display for the first time will be rare original sketchbooks from the DAG’s archive offering unique insights into her visual thinking and recurring motifs drawn from her growing years in Sanjaya, Gujarat, the cultural worlds of rural and urban India, as well as her domestic life that cannot be separated from her career. Though not a retrospective, Remembered Tales brings together the inner and outer journeys of an artist who continues to explore, transform and enchant—on her own terms.
 
"Unapologetically different from other artists, Madhvi Parekh’s work stands etymologically apart—not quite ‘modern’ as most viewers see it, and not quite folk. It is this quality of rawness that has convinced me of her importance to the Indian art world." explained Ashish Anand, CEOI and Managing Director, DAG. “Madhviji’s art exists before and beyond time. It is a siungular symbol of what true art represents. I can only hope you find it as moving, as enchanting, and as enriching as I do.”
 
Alongside a dedicated publication featuring a scholarly piece on Madhvi’s practice by Dr. Rebecca Brown of John Hopkins University, personal interviews with Madhvi and Manu Parekh, and an essay by art critic Meera Menezes, Remembered Tales will be accompanied by a three-volume set documenting five decades of her sketchbook practice—making this rich material available to scholars, artists, and future generations for research and engagement.
 
Often extolled as a ‘woman’ painter, Madhvi Parekh’s art has never been premised on gender. Instead, she occupies an artistic realm with strong ethical values based on a sense of humanitarianism, environmental inclusion, and memory. Entirely self-taught, Madhvi’s interest in art was spurred to an extent by her artist husband, Manu Parekh, and began with a perusal of Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook. Dots and lines fascinated her, and soon she was playing with them, creating an art form that has challenged critics and art writers because there is no easy category to which she can be easily confined. At most, it can be said that her work parallels folk art, even though it is not like any known folk form in India or elsewhere, and has the rawness and energy associated with modernism. Sometimes referred to as a folk modernist, hers is a style that is distinctive as well as unique.

About The Artist Madhvi Parekh (b. 1942)
Madhvi Parekh was born and raised in a village in Gujarat. With no formal education in art, her practice evolved from childhood memories, popular folk stories, and legends of her village. Art formed a part of her consciousness through the forms of painting that were part of her family’s everyday rituals, such as the traditional floor designs of rangoli. Inspired by her artist-husband Manu Parekh and artists such as Paul Klee and Miro, Madhvi began painting in 1964. Her paintings are unplanned, unfolding like a story where she adapts each work to the scale it demands, developing from a point into vast narratives. Apart from folk motifs, legends, and figures, Parekh also uses imaginary characters in figurative and abstracted orientations in her compositions, revealing the use of rhythm and repetition. In many of her works, she utilises the settings of Indian textile printing traditions such as Kalamkari and Pichwai where she enshrines the main character of the composition in the centre and fills the minor or secondary ones in the borders. A documentary film on Madhvi and her husband Manu Parekh, Dwitya, was made by Suraj Purohit in 1992. A major retrospective of her work was shown in New Delhi and Mumbai in 2017, and in New York in 2018. India’ first private art museum, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, has since acquired a sizeable collection of her work. Madhvi Parekh lives and works in Delhi.

Date 14-8-2025