Important Notice

Atul Dodiya’s artistic career traces its initial footings to the late 1980s, when the artist showed a collection of large, photorealist canvases in Mumbai at his first solo exhibition. Since then, Dodiya’s practice has metamorphosed several times, concurrently refreshing and complicating his immense artistic vocabulary to understand the nature of creativity.

Dodiya has always remained preoccupied “…with the creation of a hybrid,... Atul Dodiya’s artistic career traces its initial footings to the late 1980s, when the artist showed a collection of large, photorealist canvases in Mumbai at his first solo exhibition. Since then, Dodiya’s practice has metamorphosed several times, concurrently refreshing and complicating his immense artistic vocabulary to understand the nature of creativity.

Dodiya has always remained preoccupied “…with the creation of a hybrid, simultaneously frictive and productive genealogy for himself. His practice has been driven by the need to formulate and constantly re-formulate a personal kinship structure from diverse periods, styles, societies, disciplines, languages and art forms. He has brought Mansur and Hockney into conversation, placed Giotto and Ghatak in the same frame, staged encounters between Antonioni and Khakhar, Benode Behari Mukherjee and Gerhard Richter, Mahatma Gandhi and Beuys. Dodiya is not merely a celebrant of intertextuality for its own sake. Rather, his sense of amplified selfhood depends crucially on his ability to reach out and embrace a diversity of positions and perspectives” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Introduction”, Pale Ancestors, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, p. 109).

Dodiya’s constant drive to dislocate and invigorate his idiom, his command over various media, his deep archive of sources, and his visionary body of work have rendered him a pioneer amongst a generation of postmodern, global artists from India. In the present lot, the artist displays all of these qualities, most notably, his mastery of multiple mediums. The untitled composition on paper, rendered using watercolour, charcoal and gesso, bears witness to the artist’s transformative nature. The fluidity of Dodiya’s draftsmanship is complimented by the organic quality of the charcoal and the watery nature of the hues he has employed.

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