The Last Supper – Madhvi Parekh

‘The Last Supper’, a series of reverse paintings on acrylic by Madhvi Parekh, an art exhibition held in the Chapel at the GUST, Ahmedabad.

Inspiration for the show

Madhvi Parekh, born in 1942 in Sanjaya, a village in Gujarat, is a self-taught artist. Living and working out of Delhi, she has created a space for herself in India’s contemporary art practice, reverting for inspiration to her childhood village left far behind. Her work remains true to her rural inheritance, and, at the same time, reflects in the contemporary world.

As an infant, she recalls accompanying her father to the village square in Sanjay, Gujarat, to hear tales of the Christ being narrated by Christian missionaries. That was Madhvi Parekh’s first introduction to him. She always imagined him to be “kind” and “peace loving” but never really thought of painting him on her canvas, which, for several decades, was occupied by Durga and Kali.

But this was until she visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, some years later. Disturbed after she witnessed the Nazi torture in films and a sound and light show at the museum, when she stepped out, right outside was a church with a portrait of Christ on the facade. “It drew me. It seemed the opposite of all the hatred and atrocity I had just seen. I liked the form of the cross. The image of Jesus attracted me. I slowly started drawing him. It took a while to get it right, as it was different from what I was used to drawing. Finally, with a lot of practice, it happened,” recalls Parekh. Once she mastered sketching the figure, she started building tales around him. “Someone suggested that I should paint The Last Supper. I had seen Leonardo da Vinci’s work in Milan, and was fascinated,” says Parekh. The task of painting Christ and his 12 apostles seemed daunting at first, but soon Parekh had several renderings of her own in a series that used bright colours and folk iconography. “It is how I would depict him,” she says.

A self taught painter Manu Parekh was her teacher. She would draw lines, squares and animal faces, and then the figures emerged, depicting her surroundings in the village she grew up. She experimented with abstracts, the staircase — drawn from a childhood accident when she fell from the stairs — becoming a recurring theme. Soon, the lines turned into narratives and Parekh was painting her experiences in urban and rural spaces, women battling biases and goddesses. Distinct from Manu, Parekh’s renditions are primarily folk.

These works are on reverse acrylics, a medium, often the cumbersome (two-dimensional, can be seen from behind). “It is a difficult medium to master, the brush used to slip often, but I liked the challenge,” she says.

The works were displayed at the Chapel, GUST, Near NI church, Opposite Gujarat college.

24 February 2019.