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Lot 28

 

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“…I have allowed all of the world to enter the loneliness of my studio. I have painted, as if, at the crossroads – where east meets west, the popular and the naïve meet the high classical or the very personal, autobiographical image overlaps the universal icon. From these apparently anarchic hybrids I hope to understand the nature of creativity” (Atul Dodiya, Bombay: Labyrinth/Laboratory, The Japan Foundation Asia Center exhibition catalogue,... “…I have allowed all of the world to enter the loneliness of my studio. I have painted, as if, at the crossroads – where east meets west, the popular and the naïve meet the high classical or the very personal, autobiographical image overlaps the universal icon. From these apparently anarchic hybrids I hope to understand the nature of creativity” (Atul Dodiya, Bombay: Labyrinth/Laboratory, The Japan Foundation Asia Center exhibition catalogue, 2001, p. 75). Atul Dodiya is a conceptual artist of great versatility who has always experimented with genre and style in his work. Dodiya’s carefully built images and installations are layered with symbol and metaphor, defying regular nomenclature. Their narratives are complex, simultaneously offering sweeping views of history, politics and art from Dodiya’s global archives of information and intimate autobiographical glimpses into his family life and creative process.

The dual concerns of family and politics, the self and the collective, have always marked Dodiya’s work. As critic Gayatri Sinha explains, the artist’s “continual points of reference are his family and their location in the politics and environs of contemporary India”, particularly the city of Mumbai (Broken Branches, Bose Pacia Modern exhibition catalogue, 2003, unpaginated). This profound multimedia installation, from a series of eight works titled Each Father Lost, was created shortly after the death of artist’s father. The title of the series, borrowed from a poem written by fellow artist Gieve Patel, extends the significance of this piece from Dodiya and his family to all those that have experienced insecurity and loss, perhaps as a result of the political and religious violence that swept across India in the 1990s and early 2000s, deeply affecting the artist.

In this shrine-like installation, Dodiya uses familiar objects from his childhood including an old curtain pelmet, a retro radio set, a small bronze lion and a yellowing photograph of his friend Karamshi Pir to access the past, creating a complete environment in which the viewer can experience and empathize with the bereavement he expresses. The painted passage of text, extracted from the poem ‘Foresight’ by the late Nissim Ezekiel, and the overall sepia tones of the piece also lend to its atmosphere of nostalgia, commenting personally and generally on the significance of prescience given the fragility of human life. The artist’s “…dazzling and disparate array of images does not provide the viewer with a single comprehensive message, but it is possible to grasp threads in the tangle that link certain ideas together. At the end/origin of these threads is the artist’s life in the violent existential chaos of the city of Bombay, including his involvement in its political and social dimensions” (Hayashi Michio, Atul Dodiya: Sincere Impurity, Ibid., p. 86).

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