For Manu Parekh, painting always meant total involvement — with his self and surroundings. The current series of 14 canvasses on display at the Tao Art gallery was inspired by Benares in the late 1970s, where he closely observed flowers and how they were used and worshipped in the Indian context. The series is curated by Ranjit Hoskote, art critic and independent curator, and will be showing at the gallery till November 14.
He saw the contrastive ways in which flowers were used at different ghats: At the Dasashwamedh Ghat he saw newly-married couples worshipping Ganga with a profusion of flowers, whereas at the Manikarnika Ghat he saw flowers on dead bodies. Over the years, he pursued this symbolic, profound and universal quality of flowers very intensely.
His flowers are skewed erotically due to its ‘organic tendencies’ where he explores the flower as a sexual object. “What I see in a flower is a dramatic journey, one day at the feet of the gods, next day trampled upon. The garlands on a newly married couple or a garland on a dead body — the whole dynamics is very important to me. For me, ‘repetition’ is very important. I’m continuously adding and not rejecting. For me the flower is the biggest symbol of organic life.”
“Cosmic flowers animate many of his works. Planets spin out along galactic trails. A world-maze unwinds itself to dominate his diptychs and hybrids of flowers, birds, lungs, kidneys and polyps populate surfaces shimmering with the visual recitation of images that allude to jellyfish, spirillae, spermatozoa and plankton,” said Ranjit Hoskote, explaining Parekh’s works.
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