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Lot 150

 

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The present lot by Anju Dodiya is a double-panelled work, which stems from her preoccupation with doubles. The two sides here allude to the two facets of her own art, namely “the craving for opulent beauty blackened by the spectres of death and decay.” It is part of a group of works that was exhibited at her show at Laxmi Vilas Palace in Vadodara. She placed them in the ancient Roman testudo war formation where shields faced outward at the... The present lot by Anju Dodiya is a double-panelled work, which stems from her preoccupation with doubles. The two sides here allude to the two facets of her own art, namely “the craving for opulent beauty blackened by the spectres of death and decay.” It is part of a group of works that was exhibited at her show at Laxmi Vilas Palace in Vadodara. She placed them in the ancient Roman testudo war formation where shields faced outward at the edges. For Dreamers, she faced the side bearing intricate motifs on a field of green outwards. The same side also presents a herald-like form produced by karigars, reflecting Dodiya’s fascination with imagery drawn from the chivalric age. In the words of art critic Nancy Adajania, the artist’s work “has always gathered energy from heraldic symbolism, the drama of chivalric devices, tales of duels, jousts and troubadour romances, and the narratives of knights, samurais and their ladies, and their pillow books.”

The chandeliers on the other side of the panel draw upon the spectacular mirrored hall from Madhubala’s iconic dance sequence in Mughal-e-Azam and chandeliers from the music salon in celebrated director Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar. Says Adajania, “Anju draws from South Asia’s visual culture of excess and melodrama, from cinema and fashion. She distrusts grandeur but cannot resist the spectacle; she savours lyrical hyperbole and sartorial flamboyance, but is driven to curtail their capacity for decadence.” (Nancy Adajania, “In the Cold Country of the Mind”, Nancy Adajania and Sharada Dwivedi, Throne of Frost: Anju Dodiya, Singapore: Bodhi Art, 2007)

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