New York’s Aicon Gallery unveiled nearly half a century of work by the prolific Indian painter Anjolie Ela Menon in her first-ever retrospective exhibition in the United States. While the New Delhi-based artist has previously exhibited stateside, “A Retrospective” featured over 40 paintings and drawings from Menon’s oeuvre, offering American audiences a rare glimpse of early pieces borrowed from private collections alongside more recent works.

Among the newer paintings, the “Divine Mothers Series” (2016–17) recreates religious iconography within a familial context: four portraits depict famous deities and their mothers. In Yashoda with Baby Krishna (2016), one of the most widely revered Hindu gods is rendered as an infant—naked in his recognizable blue skin except for a diminutive version of his peacock feather crown—sitting in the lap of his foster mother. With her hair freely flowing over her bare arms, Yashoda’s earthly appearance is a striking contrast against the otherworldliness of her child. A similar juxtaposition occurs in Parvati with Ganesh (2016), in which a simply adorned woman holds her elephant-headed youngster. In Maya with Gautama (2016), the mother in profile faces her child-Buddha. Regarding her inspiration behind the series, Menon says, “It struck me that all these mothers are worshipped for themselves and the divinity is all encompassing—the mothers nurturing their would-be-divine babies.” Exemplifying this shared divinity, halos encircle both heads in Madonna with Child(2017).

An older painting of Madonna (1973), with elongated fingers and an amorphous silhouette, reveals the influence of foundational Indian modernist painters such as MF Husain and Amrita Sher-Gil. Although references to diverse faiths reappear throughout Menon’s work, she describes her personal beliefs as being “of a far more abstract nature.” As a young artist, she studied in Paris and traveled across Europe. Her appropriation of religious aesthetics, particularly Byzantine art, is evident in the compositions of her portraits. In a new work, the artist used the artistic tradition formerly reserved for holy likenesses to deliver images of common folk. In this case, we see New Delhi farmers with their livestock painted in a saintly manner in the triptych Goatherd (2017).