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Lot 17

 

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For Anju Dodiya, using a mattress as a surface is akin to working on a painting that is already in process, rather than beginning a new piece facing the intimidating blankness of paper. The mattress offered her texture and presence, and influenced the subject of the work she would do on it. "When you work on paper, confronting that white is a terribly fearful thing. With textile, something's there already, and I have to interact with the... For Anju Dodiya, using a mattress as a surface is akin to working on a painting that is already in process, rather than beginning a new piece facing the intimidating blankness of paper. The mattress offered her texture and presence, and influenced the subject of the work she would do on it. "When you work on paper, confronting that white is a terribly fearful thing. With textile, something's there already, and I have to interact with the textures. It made the painting process more carefree for me. And there was a great pleasure in working with the textures and also kind of fighting them with the paint. It was great fun." Also, being a bed, the bulging mattresses pushed Dodiya to contemplate new ways in which to express her interests in "…bodies and relationships and sleep and dreams" (as quoted in "Gieve Patel talks to Anju Dodiya", Anju Dodiya, Bose Pacia exhibition catalogue, 2006, not paginated)

The present lot, loosely based on the Greek myth of Penelope and Odysseus, explores the dream worlds of the protagonist, a solitary woman who, like Penelope, is awaiting the return of her partner. Weaving by day and unraveling by night, the dualities that Penelope represented resonated with Dodiya's use of mattresses and with the artist's personal life as well. "It was visually very interesting and I make personal connections because of the waiting metaphor and with my own skin condition, where earlier I was waiting for the white to turn into brown and now I am waiting for the brown to turn white" (Ibid.).

"Also based on the Penelope myth, 'The Path of Berries' plays with the eternal image of the ethereal heroine dreaming of her beloved. Image and field are perfectly synchronised: the textile is a harvest of pink roses. The heroine's dress is picked out from the embossed floral print of the textile; her eyes are caressed by velveteen petals. She dreams of a falcon: this unlikely messenger of love, a heroic image borrowed from a Chinese drawing, grows larger than life and occupies three-fourths of the mattress. Its claws rest on another apparition produced from the heroine's mind: an embrace from her lover, this time echoing a still from Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'. A Mondrian-like grid, which doubles as a puzzle of pathways marked with splotchy berries, holds this lavish fantasy in place. The falcon's coat is worked to a thick scruffy weave-like pattern, quoting Penelope's patient weaving through the day and her nocturnal unravelings. The skeins of thread and dream fuse into each other as myth overlaps with popular culture, memory turns to fragrance and image translates as touch" (Nancy Adajania, "The Varying Temperature of Love: Recent Paintings by Anju Dodiya", Ibid.).

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