Banaras, the holy land for Hindus to wash down their sin and re-emerge anew: it’s the site for Manu Parekh’s renditions in this collection of serigraphs. 

Blue, brown, gray, pink, crimson, lemon, yellow—Parekh’s colouring of this pilgrimage space has no limits. Ironically, Banaras, as a source of inspiration, came to Parekh at a time when he faced extraordinary difficulty creating new artworks. The artist had just moved to Delhi from Kolkata and found himself experiencing a void in his life and art. His salvation: Banaras. 

For Parekh, Banaras was symbolic of the tumultuous relationship the Indian psyche have with religion. “Fear and faith”, according to him, go hand in hand. This dynamic of anxiety is ever present in his Banaras works; crooked and oblong temples and trees, painted entirely in black figures, loom darkly over the lurid colours in the background. The mixed air of melancholia and lush theatre, which turns up often in his works, is part of the aesthetic that shaped Parekh’s status as one of India’s eminent Modernists.