Important Notice

Atul Dodiya's deep engagement with artists he admires often manifests in his intertextual works, which engage in a dialogue with their predecessors while inhabiting new contexts. The two works in the present lot were part of an exhibition titled Girlfriends: French, German, Italian, Egyptian, Santiniketan, Ghatkopar..., which brought together six bodies of work in which Dodiya reimagines portraits of women by artists across geographies... Atul Dodiya's deep engagement with artists he admires often manifests in his intertextual works, which engage in a dialogue with their predecessors while inhabiting new contexts. The two works in the present lot were part of an exhibition titled Girlfriends: French, German, Italian, Egyptian, Santiniketan, Ghatkopar..., which brought together six bodies of work in which Dodiya reimagines portraits of women by artists across geographies and generations - including Francis Picabia, Albrecht Drer, Piero della Francesca, ancient Fayum mummy portraits, Rabindranath Tagore, and an unknown artist from Ghatkopar.

The Santiniketan series draws upon Tagore's watercolour portraits from the 1930s, masked by dark, prominent blotches, "the enigmatic faces of Tagore's women subjects partially obscured. Picabia's spirit seems to pervade these works... Laterally, Dodiya also encourages us to realise that Rabindranath Tagore and Picabia are contemporaries, that their drawings of women coincide across the 1930s. Through such overwriting, Dodiya confers the transfer of the unconscious into the images of Tagore, rendering the works more affective and universal." (Gayatri Sinha, Atul Dodiya Girlfriends: French, German, Italian, Egyptian, Santiniketan, Ghatkopar..., New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2017, pp. 11-12)

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