Important Notice

Atul Dodiya's deep engagement with artists he admires, such as Raja Ravi Varma, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte, Paul Klee, and Bhupen Khakhar - and here, 20th century Dutch painter Piet Mondrian - often manifests in his works, which engage in a dialogue with their predecessors while inhabiting new contexts. The present lot is part of a series of nine works created by Dodiya in 2004-2005 for the exhibition Cracks in Mondrian,... Atul Dodiya's deep engagement with artists he admires, such as Raja Ravi Varma, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte, Paul Klee, and Bhupen Khakhar - and here, 20th century Dutch painter Piet Mondrian - often manifests in his works, which engage in a dialogue with their predecessors while inhabiting new contexts. The present lot is part of a series of nine works created by Dodiya in 2004-2005 for the exhibition Cracks in Mondrian, showcased at Bose Pacia in New York in March - April 2005.

This series was inspired by two events that affected the artist in 2001 - first, a devastating earthquake in his native Gujarat on 26 January, which caused widespread destruction of life and property. Shortly after this tragedy, the artist visited the Tate Modern in London, where he saw the works of Mondrian on display, with their distinctive grids and cracks. Noting the resemblance between Mondrian's surfaces and the new cracks in the Gujarati landscape, he set out to create this series.

Cracks in Mondrian comprises acrylic and marble dust paintings on large-format canvases, attached to vertical PVC pipes painted white. Each work features bright stains and blotches shaped like maps of Indian states with histories of suffering, illustrated in the 18th century by the French diplomat and cartographer Jean-Baptiste Gentil. The maps are overlaid with grids of perpendicular black Mondrian-esque lines that cut across the canvas, and the works are also inscribed with Gentil's transliterated names of the depicted place, such as "Chadjeanabad" (New Delhi), "Bear" (Bihar), "Gouserate" (Gujarat), and in the present lot, "Aiderabad" for Hyderabad.

According to artist Achia Anzi, "The reference to Gentil's maps is not accidental. Gentil's ethnographic maps along with their folklorist illustrations are part of the Western effort to represent and thus gain mastery over the territory of the other. By abstracting these maps and transforming them into colour planes devoid of lines, demarcations, figures and textual references, Dodiya neutralises the oppressive apparatus of representation." The grille-like grids, however, "block access to the map and its historical territory. Mondrian's cold and calculated compositions are blind to the agitated history of Dodiya's post-colonized province." ("Abstraction De-Constructed through the Lens of Post.Colonialism," Asia Contemporary Art Week, acaw.info, online) This series demonstrates Dodiya's masterful use of layers and subtexts to question and explore contemporary narratives.

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