‘If It Rains Fire’ by Atul Dodiya at Nature Morte, Berlin

An exhibition of Atul Dodiya’s recent works takes place at Nature Morte, Berlin. ‘If It Rains Fire’ examines highly critical political issues and his home nation’s relationship with its neighbors. The body of work also addresses contentious issues, such as the Naxalite movement and terrorism.

The latest show is primarily comprised of ‘paintings under construction’ seemingly still in the process of making. Significantly, these are not painted works in the conventional sense, albeit replicas of paintings that have been crafted out of milled steel and burnished to a rather dull, silvery glow. For them, he has burnished the images onto steel sheets, made to resemble the back of canvases.

With their faces tilted towards the wall and delicately standing on blocks erected on the floor, you get to see the back-sides of stretched canvases, stretcher bars - dividing their spaces into squares and rectangles. Throwing light on his new body of work, a curatorial note elaborates: “Images conjoin on these back-side surfaces, coaxed on by the artist’s hand with soldering putty used to repair automobiles (not paint, for sure) and through the vehicles of refrigerator magnets picturing some of art history’s greatest hits, collected in museum gift shops around the world. The resulting works are conundrums of references, purposefully chosen by the artist so as to posit an amalgam of identities that is both genuine and sincere.”

Another suite of paper works is done in watercolors. ‘Breakfast Project’ is a watercolor that employs text. Atul Dodiya has been over the years quoted the works of artists like Raja Ravi and Marcel Duchamp, who have played a significant role in his life. In the past he has rendered exquisite poetry in fine hand-painted watercolor letters. He has turned to news headlines this time as explained in an interview: “The newspapers always state the full report is on page so and so, but one might wonder what really the whole story is; is the tension between our neighbors a created one?” In another work he alludes to the struggles and survival instincts of the lower middle-class, his major artistic concern, having grown up in Mumbai’s working class locality himself.

Completing the curious display is a sculptural work, large-scale watercolors, and two sets of smaller works-on-paper, all continuations of on-going bodies of works. They both compliment and build on the images and materials used in the ‘replica’ paintings, to attain a rhizomatic structure. In it the artist reflects on artistic influences, the manipulation of meaning through juxtapositions, and the extreme self-consciousness of producing art from a specific vantage point for a globalized consumption.