Abracadabra - it's gone!

Madhvi Parekh’s world is alive with imagery and enchantment, so what if it’s failed to pull in the big bucks — yet

Every once in a while the art market manages to astound you — no, not because of any unexplained surge in prices (which is fairly routine) but because of how it underrates artists. Art writers chasing the chimera of high prices sometimes fail to spot a great opportunity – and of course, its mystery – because the exact opposite is rarely written about. And of no one is this more true than the reserved Madhvi Parekh who has been part of the art circuit since her first exhibition in 1972, her obvious acknowledgement and success, but still, her yawning distance from the market.

 

In the glitz and glamour that surrounds high art, Madhvi Parekh is easily overlooked — and not just because she is diminutive but because she is less than demanding. In a keenly awaited book on the artist (A World of Memories, Penguin, Rs 2,999), essayist Peter Nagy reminds viewers of “the importance of her work as a bridge between the village and the city…a bridge between the avant-garde and the traditional arts”. If he explains the “secular” nature of her art despite its domination by deities and gods and goddesses and, increasingly in this decade, of Christ replacing the Hindu gods of her own environment, it is perhaps a nod to the storytelling tradition of naïf artists that manages to escape the dogmas of more formal art practices. Nagy himself explains that “her works may cross over from a native charm to a self-conscious surrealism”.

The rich tapestry of her world in which the neighbour’s life is as engrossing as the mythological fables she adapts is best explained by Jyotindra Jain. “Madhvi is a contemporary Indian artist, not anxious to negate her rural inheritance, and at the same time reflecting in her work the contemporary world — its pressures, its ideological tensions, its proclivity for fragmentation, and above all, its eclectic art language,” he notes. The book itself is disappointing for being sparsely written – in the manner of a catalogue – and for the choice of her work which it represents (limited to the recent two decades), but is important nevertheless for bringing into focus the work of an artist who has not got her just rewards. At a time when even “folk” is pulling in the bucks, Madhvi’s lack of market penetration is all the more astonishing.

The highest auction price for Madhvi appears to have been achieved at Christie’s New York in September 2006, where a massive 60” x 72” acrylic on canvas Durga fetched Rs 4.5 lakh. In February 2008, at Emamichisel’s auction in Kolkata, an Untitled work fetched Rs 3.9 lakh, while Devi sold for only Rs 1.2 lakh. Previously, in May 2005, Saffronart fetched her Rs 91,000 for an Untitled canvas, and Rs 89,000 for the engrossing My Daughter’s World. Works by Madhvi routinely sell for less than Rs 1 lakh even now, provoking one into wondering whether the simplicity of her art with its native interpretations has anything to do with it. Has the market trained itself to acknowledge and pay only for something that is complex, or abstract? Does the local vernacular, which lacks the pretensions of more familiar art, secede before theories that the self-taught have not been indulged in?

Madhvi Parekh has enjoyed the guidance of her husband, Manu Parekh, and has been exhibited by galleries not just in India but also in Europe and Asia. Critical acclaim internationally for her nod to India’s indigenous tradition of assimilation of stories and forms have formed part of “the dialectics of society and its politics”. Nagy points out that Madhvi’s challenge might have to do with issues of “identity” which many Indians face and which is how most Indians “negotiate their definitions and representations of themselves”. In rejecting her rural in favour of what we perceive to be urban, there is a dismaying sense of delusion. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the contrast between the worlds that two contemporary women painters, both residents of New Delhi, inhabit. Today, a huge mural by Arpana Caur will go up for auction by Saffronart at an estimated price of Rs 8-10 crore. The yawning gap between her and Madhvi Parekh and what it reveals of our prejudices, therefore, is all the more insulting.

These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated. 
kishoresingh_22@hotmail.com