Manu Parekh

Manu Parekh was born in 1939 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. He trained at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai), completing a diploma in drawing and painting in 1962. He joined the Weavers' Service Centre in Bombay as an art designer in 1963, later moving to Calcutta before becoming a design consultant to the Handicraft and Handloom Export Corporation of India in New Delhi in 1974. His first solo exhibition of graphics and paintings was held in Ahmedabad in 1968.

Described on his own website as a third-generation Indian modernist, Parekh is best known for the semi-abstract, expressionist Banaras and Kashi paintings he began developing in the 1980s, alongside recurring flower and landscape series. He has exhibited widely at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai and the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi, and his work has been the subject of major retrospectives, including "Manu Parekh, 60 Years of Selected Works" at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and Mumbai in 2018.

As of 2026, Parekh continues to live and work in New Delhi. Press coverage from 2024 and 2025 describes him painting daily at his home in Chittaranjan Park while recovering from knee surgery, and profiles published in early 2025 describe him, at age 86, as still actively producing new work for exhibition. His most recent gallery, Nature Morte in New Delhi, presented new paintings under the title "Flower Sutra" in 2025 and "Flower Sutra Part Two" in 2026.

Parekh's reputation rests substantially on institutional recognition rather than a single defining critical text. His work has been read consistently as a bridge between Indian modernism's early generations and a more expressionist, materially charged abstraction, most visibly in the recurring Banaras/Kashi series that critics and curators treat as his central body of work. That reading has been reinforced by sustained state and academy recognition, including the 1982 Lalit Kala Akademi National Award and the Padma Shri, and by the scale of the 2018 retrospective, which brought together more than 150 works across paintings, sculpture, and sketchbooks to mark six decades of his career. His inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale collateral exhibition "Cosmic Garden," organized around the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art's holdings, extended that institutional profile into an international context.

The highest documented auction price for a work by Manu Parekh is USD 94,875, for a painting titled "Man Made Blinding," according to the "Top 10 Auction Records" table published on the artist's own website. That table does not identify the auction house, sale location, or exact sale date, and no independent auction database consulted for this profile corroborates those missing details, so the figure should be treated as the best-documented but not fully verified record. Secondary market commentary describes large Banaras-themed canvases regularly selling in the range of roughly INR 20 to 40 lakh, and references a landmark Banaras painting reported to have sold for INR 1.6 crore at Sotheby's in 2016, though that report does not give a precise price, lot number, or date and cannot be independently confirmed here.

No catalogue raisonne exists for Manu Parekh, and public auction data on his market is comparatively sparse and inconsistently documented, with the artist's own website providing the only itemized record of top sale prices. Gallery representation should be confirmed directly, since recent solo exhibitions place Nature Morte, New Delhi as his clearest current representing gallery, though no source uses the explicit language of formal representation. Collectors should also expect some variance in secondary reporting on award years (his Padma Shri is dated to either 1991 or 1992 depending on the source) and should treat any single reported auction price, including the USD 94,875 record cited above, as provisional until the underlying sale can be matched to a named auction house and date.