Bewildering Benares captured on canvas

The Art Alive Gallery presents eminent artist Manu Parekh's work in Benares at its Gurgaon venue. It’s his first major solo show held in the capital city of India in over six years.

Manu Parekh first went to the holy city of Benares in the throes of an artistic crisis and traveled the Ganges by boat, all the while observing the life of this ancient city at various times of the day and from various perspectives.

Later, he got off the boat and climbed the ghats; here he saw the temples and the people conducting private rituals in common spaces. Flowers, festivals, faces and rituals all became fodder for his work.

These repeated visits gave his practice a new direction and his works visual coherence and intensity. It allowed him to imagine a modernity that embraces the everyday life in India?s provinces. Faith presents this body of work from the perspective of a painter engaging with vernacular religiosity and spirituality as well as from the perspective of Benaras as a place that has shaped the subjectivity of many modern artists in the twentieth century.

Organized into four sections, the exhibition begins with ‘Glimpses from a Boat’ that has his virtuoso modernist, landscapes of Benares, which the artist developed along his journeys on the Ganges. The paintings are richly hued explorations that depict the his experience of the corruption, beauty and sheer force of Benares, an antique city in which there are many shadows formed between the light and the darkness.

The second section, titled ‘Transformed Stone’, celebrates the hopes and desires that humans bring to objects they deem sacred. If landscape is the transformation of natural scenery into cultural artifact, then Manu Parekh’s paintings specifically render the simultaneous elevation and domestication of the sacred.

‘Repeating Forms’, the third section, uses the concept of repetition, a process which has long fascinated him, to arrive at something profound about making art and revisiting familiar visual tropes and places over an extended period of time...