Important Notice

Painted a year after his 2001 Body/Wash and Tearscape series of works, the present lot carries forward Atul Dodiya’s economical innovations in figuration, and illuminates his expertise as a watercolourist.

Harnessing the fluidity of the medium, “…Dodiya’s interpolations suggest the intimate. It is the body that forms the focus of Dodiya’s interpolations: he addresses the figure in laminar washed, in passages of colour that might... Painted a year after his 2001 Body/Wash and Tearscape series of works, the present lot carries forward Atul Dodiya’s economical innovations in figuration, and illuminates his expertise as a watercolourist.

Harnessing the fluidity of the medium, “…Dodiya’s interpolations suggest the intimate. It is the body that forms the focus of Dodiya’s interpolations: he addresses the figure in laminar washed, in passages of colour that might possibly have passed for abstractionist stratagems, had they not been modulated into representational forms” (Ranjit Hoskote, Body/Wash: Recent Watercolours by Atul Dodiya, Gallery Chemould exhibition catalogue, 2001, unpaginated).

Dodiya refines the body to attitudes and activities, strips the personality down to an athletics of expression: the body at rest; running; dancing; listening; praying; sleeping. His figures dive, stretch out, perform bodily functions…stylised into abstract gesture; many of them reveal their origins in classical Graeco-Roman or Indic statuary, or in the poses of the models who pervade the advertising imagery of mass culture” (Ibid.).

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