Concerns and inspirations of a celebrated Indian artist

For an Indian viewer, Dodiya’s intellectual rigor is discreet and playful, mentions The Mint writer Sanjukta Sharma in a recent essay (‘The great assembler’) on eve of his new show. In this sense, he is an Indian artist primarily for Indians.

Leading collector Anupam Poddar, who owns three works by Dodiya—Destination 1 (1984), acquired in the early 1990s, Petals (2000), acquired in 2000, and B for Bapu (2001), acquired in 2002—says: “Contrary to this perception, I think that he has done well for himself on the international scene. The question for me is how one views international success.”

He used to work at his father’s home in the same neighborhood until a few years ago; there, he said in an earlier interview to Lounge, neighbors constantly dropped by to give him their feedback—“some valuable and some not”. From the old studio in a chawl, he envisioned and created works that looked outward to the city, to the history of Indian art, to artists he admired and later, very deeply, at Gandhi and at ideas of nationalism after the Gujarat riots, and chiseled the idiom for his hyper-referential art.

In the new show on view at Mumbai’s the Mumbai- based Chemould Prescott Road gallery ideas of nationalism and Mumbai’s transformation, which have engaged him ever since the late 1990s, are conspicuously absent. Words scribbled in white on a black canvas, some of which are mounted on wooden frames, resemble blackboards.

The words could be written in chalk, except they are oil on canvas, rubbed on the edges to create an effect that looks like chalk smudged by a duster. On each canvas, occupying a secondary, corner position, are figures made with oil and marble dust. The words are English translations by Arundhathi Subramaniam and Naushil Mehta of a work of absurd fantasy, Bako Chhe Kalpo, by Gujarati author Labhshankar Thaker.

“It is a work that has been with me for many years. The idea of a 10-year-old boy having a conversation with Gandhi, not about big ideas of nationhood or patriotism but of ordinary things, reminds me, personally, of a lost time,” he tells the writer.