For her latest show, artist Anjolie Ela Menon taps into her memory bank

Revisitations feels like a flip book. As you move from painting to painting at the exhibition at Delhi’s Shridharani Gallery, the passage of time is palpable through the changes in Anjolie Ela Menon’s practice. Divided into the past and the present, the exhibition evokes a sense of the familiar and the unfamiliar. You see the artist revisit human figures, themes of motherhood and the divine feminine, and favourite motifs of the chair and the crow, but something has changed. The latest series of 30 oil paintings, created over the past year, are smaller in scale. The human figures, once situated within landscapes—as evident in the Goatherd series—now take up the entire frame. This, combined with the subjects’ direct gaze, makes them rather imposing and larger-than-life.

Revisitations, being presented by Vadehra Art Gallery, comes four years after Menon’s last solo show with the gallery. There has been a shift in the artist’s approach from the autobiographical to the introspective. You can almost visualise the artist relishing moments of solitude with her memory bank as a companion. There is a revisitation of memories of her travels through Europe while attending a course at the École Nationale Supérieure Des Beaux-Arts in Paris, of taking in the old world charm of her husband’s ancestral home in Kerala, visits to Lakkar Bazar and Bhendi Bazar while residing at Laxmi Sadan in Mumbai, and the bonds formed in Nizamuddin Basti, where her studio is located. The goatherds, as seen from her studio window in Delhi, the Namboodri priests with the tilak on the forehead, and the crows that would sit in her balcony in Mumbai as she painted keep coming back in different forms.

“The melancholia, sense of solitude and contemplation remains the same as ever, be it in earlier works such as November with the solitary sari-clad lady in the verandah or the new Untitled series,” says Uma Nair, who has written the essay for the catalogue. “However, the treatment and composition has changed with time. The heads are now smaller, frontal and more straightforward. She is 86 and the strength in her hands is no longer what it used to be. However, what continues is her connection with the humans around her. Memory and the human gaze continue to be the pillars of her work.” Another unbroken thread is Menon’s work with Masonite—she is one of the few artists to paint on the hard surface. She painstakingly builds her surfaces by applying thin, translucent layers of paint on Masonite, scraping and repainting until she achieves a luminous quality.

In the section featuring new works, the still life paintings are right at the end, after the section on heads, allowing the viewer to take in the full arc of Menon’s practice. Take, for instance, the Untitled work from 2025, featuring a simple red piece of furniture with a threadbare striped seat. The chair seems to be waiting for its human occupant as one crow makes itself comfortable on an armrest and another below. A fluttering kite and a ball resting nearby suggest the setting to be a lawn or a park. Juxtapose this against older works such as The Frenchman’s House, which featured a vacant grand green Victorian armchair with a smiling Kamadhenu nearby in an opulent setting. “A chair can be so many things. It can be a marker for a person or the passing of time. There is a reason the show is called Revisitations,” says Nair. “Take the series Pyotr as an example, which she first painted in 1972. She depicted the figure of the Batushka, or the Russian Orthodox priest, but in a modern style—you could see that in the treatment of the vastra. In the new works, there is an inherent minimalism, which is so interesting to note for someone who might have followed her work for years.”

At Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam, Delhi, till 18 April, 11am-7pm.