“(Until 2013) There had been a long gap since my last exhibition in 1987. Correa’s latest, Mood Indigo (2019), is part of their booth at the ongoing India Art Fair in Delhi. Priya and Amrita Jhaveri of Jhaveri Contemporary signed her on and have been taking her work to Frieze New York and Frieze London since. While that show wasn’t sold-out, it led to notices by the right audience. Shireen had acquired a large new space and insisted I show my work," says Correa. “It was my first exhibition after a long time. This wave of global recognition, she tells me, started in 2013, when she exhibited her work at Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai, at the urging of gallerist Shireen Gandhy. Trained as a microbiologist, and as someone who never formally studied art or weaving, Correa is excessively modest about her practice. Large-scale commissions include Axis Mundi (1997-99), woven in six sections, each 8x12ft, for the entranceway of Sarjan Plaza, Mumbai. Her Banyan Tree (1984) was the first woven art piece to be collected by the National Museum in Delhi. While Correa has produced a limited body of work-a lot of her work has been commission-based, and she briefly retired in the 1980s-her work has now found its way to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The MoMA and The Met in New York, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Tate Modern, London. On her return, Correa continued her training at the Weavers’ Service Centre in Mumbai, a research institute founded by the cultural activist Pupul Jayakar. Strengell took Correa under her wing, even giving her the working drawings of the special loom she had designed to set up once back home.
A month later, when Charles was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, and she was searching for someone who could teach her to make rya-rugs, she had the good fortune to meet Marianne Strengell, the influential Finnish-American modernist textile artist who had just retired as head of the Cranbrook Academy’s textile department. On a visit to Finland, she had been struck by rya-rugs, beautiful creations in luxuriant wool, with deep, resonating colours.
It was in 1962 that the loom entered Correa’s life.
But the most imposing presence, by far, is a loom in the centre of the living room, a fixture of five decades. There is a quirky installation of empty Yakult bottles in a large glass jar and Correa’s own tapestries preside over a few walls. Raza and Akbar Padamsee, and sketches and prints by Howard Hodgkin and Leo Lionni-all friends of the couple. There are paintings by modern artists S.H. Copper pots of various dimensions gleam on a windowsill, making for a unique domestic art installation. I am meeting Correa at her home in Sonmarg apartments in Mumbai’s Malabar Hill, an iconic residential high-rise designed by her late husband, the Padma Vibhushan winning architect Charles Correa.