A boy talks to Gandhi and an artist listens

Artist Atul Dodiya’s new show, entitled ‘Bako exists. Imagine’, at the Mumbai- based Chemould Prescott Road gallery is a sort of crystallization of the idea of assemblage and astute meaning-making.

With the paintings in oil, acrylic & marble dust plus an installation of wooden cabinets that contain works of art and found objects, he reverts back to his formative years, when his influences were unrealized, unshaped and raw. It’s a celebration of my childhood heroes and also my growing up, he quips. Among them are Satyajit Ray, Bhupen Khakhar, Jasper Johns, Francois Truffaut, his father, Bollywood villains, Joseph Beuys and last but not the least, Mahatma Gandhi. It’s really staggering.

All the 12 paintings on view as part of his new showcase, according to his wife and an artist herself Anju Dodiya, a rather strange mix of the deeply personal and a sort of literary fantasy with a humor, which has saved him from becoming obscure, so to say.

The eastern suburb of Ghatkopar, where he works and stays is full of a tumultuous existence marked by heavy goods trucks, rickshaws and buses that negotiate its clogged roads. A home to middle-class housing societies and small businesses, it’s a new, complex India in the making, like the city’s many other suburbs. Atul Dodiya says, “It’s an India that interests me, encompassing my quintessentially Indian concerns—the changing city, for example, the contrasts and the conflicts in a city.”

The writer quotes Paris-based Indian art collector-gallerist Hervé Perdriolle, who says: “The multi-faceted aspect of Atul Dodiya’s work is rich and dense. Where many of the contemporary artists develop just one facet of their research to (create) a form of conspicuous repetition, he does not hesitate at all to expand his research and themes.

“The speed at which his works are done, for runs at bienniales, fairs and exhibitions, leaves little time for deeper analysis. But that takes time, and yet the work fascinates as much as the artist himself seems fascinated by his peers.” Added to this lifelong dogged involvement with his very roots and India’s rich art history is the artist’s antiquated, almost Gandhian approach to the forces of the market.