If you stare at Manisha Parekh’s watercolour works, on display at Delhi’s Nature Morte gallery, long enough, you can follow the path of her strokes. In a sort of optical illusion, her lines and curves rise above the surface of paper, leaving behind what seems like a shapeless dried-up puddle of pigments—blues, yellows, reds and more–– giving the viewer an inroad into the artist’s mind that tells her when
to control her medium and when to let go.
“It’s wonderful the way water has its own fluidity, something that allows for accidents to create marbling effects. But I am in control, more or less, because the work only comes together when you’re starting to hold it down and tie loose ends,” she says, adding, “It’s like a musical composition.”
The show features works made in the last two years. Ironically, being confined to her studio somehow gave Manisha room to expand on the canvas. The scale of her works became bigger and began featuring bursts of colour, something the 59-year-old artist has rarely done in her over three-decade-long career.
Hence, the title––Chromatic Flight. “During that time, it was possible to put your energy into work, and I think the presence of colour is a happy, optimistic one, and perhaps that was required,” she says.
But the artist has always had a tendency to surprise herself and her viewers. One of her first acts was
to choose abstract art as a medium of expression, instead of following in the footsteps of her illustrious parents Manu and Madhvi Parekh, who are both largely figurative artists.
She recalls the foundation being laid at MS University in Baroda, where renowned modernist Nasreen Mohamedi taught pictorial representation at the time. “During the Object Drawing class, she would say the first decision we had to make was to choose whether we’re going to hold the sheet vertically or horizontally for our compositions,” Manisha says, adding, “I’m not sure whether I understood what it meant at the age of 16, but I followed it and probably understood, years later, what she said, when I was trying to find my language as an artist.”
It was at the Royal College of Art in London, where Manisha was pursuing her masters in Painting, that she truly came into her own as an abstract artist. Her work started getting emptier, more object-oriented
and minimal.
“My practice became a lot about material, the medium. It became an inquiry about what a material can offer because each has different properties, different abilities, and it became an interesting journey to make friends with each of them,” she says. The artist’s versatility with material is evident in Chromatic Flight that has, besides two collections of watercolour works, a series of charcoal paintings and two installations––‘Alchemy’, in iron and copper, and ‘Follow Me’ in mild steel.
What drives her choice for a material? “Chance encounters,” she says. It can occur on seeing how another artist plays with it, at other times it might be driven by sheer curiosity. Sometimes,
a material that did not work in the past suddenly makes sense when revisited years later. The intent to explore in one’s practice is key to finding their unique language with a material, a belief that led her to co-found the Khoj International Artists Workshop, which encourages artists to experiment with alternative ideas.
Alchemy is an outcome of one such encounter. Manisha recalls that she wouldn’t have considered working with metal had it not been for designer and curator Rajeev Sethi who, a few years ago, commissioned a large-scale metal installation by her. Initially reluctant, the artist finally decided
to take the plunge to discover that it was a medium that spoke a language she understood.
Alchemy comprises 21 pieces in abstract shapes featuring piercings and indentations. “What got me excited was the colour of copper and iron, and the kind of oxidation or rusting changes they undergo. The idea started with the reference that all our traditional kitchen ware is either copper or iron, and they develop similar hammerings overtime with use. And as the work was getting made, it was quite beautiful to see the way the colour of the metal changed with human touch,” Manisha says,
as she basks in the copper glory of her exhibition, waiting for the next encounter.
When & Where
Chromatic Flight,
Nature Morte Gallery,
Dhan Mill Compound, Delhi
Till April 2