Atul Dodiya

Expacio Uno, Reina Sophia National Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid, 2002
E.T. and Others, Walsh Gallery, Chicago, 2002

The shutter is painted on an industrial rolling shutter that rolls onto itself into a metal coving. The edges and top panels of the shutter remain unpainted. There are minor abrasions along the edges of a far panel of the shutter. Originally the concept of this work allowed the viewer to roll the shutter gate up and down to reveal the canvas beneath. This action caused small but repetitive scrapes on some areas of its surface which have been retouched. In the top third of the panel, losses have been retouched to the right of the 'Father's' head in the upper right corner and in the upper left. It is recommended that the shutter be transported and kept fully rolled down at all times to prevent similar damage in the future. The canvas beneath is in good overall condition. The shutter can be dismantled and comes in five parts, the shutter, the coving, the two edge panels and the roller mechanism. The canvas is in a scroll form and is installed behind the shutter on two metal batons.
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The fusion of western modernist styles with Indian street-based realism, which draws upon popular culture, the politics of class, gender and personal identity is frequently a starting point for Contemporary Indian Art, particularly for the artist Atul Dodiya. His large format paintings and installations reveal his masterful command over numerous painting disciplines and styles and a passionate and in depth knowledge of art history. This rare combination merged with a quiet wit allows him to create inventive images that are metaphorically suggestive. His extensive and global visual vocabulary makes reference to Western art both ancient and modern, religious paintings, Indian movie posters, billboards and calendar art, constantly blurring the division between genres. The artist enjoys playing with styles and artistic concepts, merging and overlapping them in unexpected ways to excite and intrigue the viewer, providing both an insight into previous art movements whilst simultaneously providing a comment ary on his own career.

The current work is produced on an industrial metal sliding shutter commonplace in the commercial districts of Bombay, part of the 'street furniture' of the city.  Under normal circumstances the shutters are used to lock up a shop front and bear advertisements for everyday products, but the artist instead depicts his own father standing in the doorway of his home on its corrugated exterior. The choice of the surface is intentional as it presents an industrial barrier to the viewer, but underneath the painted shutter is a second canvas that although initially obscured can be viewed once the shutter is opened. As the critic Ranjit Hoskote states, the shutters become a 'simulacrum of the metropolitan streetscape'. The work thus creates a tension between the public and private, internal thoughts and external facades.

In this work titled Father Dodiya presents us with two forms of ancestry, a personal ancestry, symbolized by an image of his father shown with a swelling belly and a more universal ancestry of his art and culture, revealed through the veiled artistic references in the canvas that is hidden beneath the shutter.  The swelling belly of his father is a reference to the pain and discomfort that his father experienced towards the end of his life when he suffered from an enlargement of the spleen. The artist states 'the belly became bloated like a pregnant woman from which extends an umbilical cord that continues onto the painting beneath becoming the umbilical cord of India wrapped around a Brancusi column a symbol for me of time, purity ...great art.  At the base of the column is Gandhi holding a mason's trowel trying to repair a crumbling India, with two priests building a wall behind him.' (In conversation with the artist July 2007) There is furthermore an intentional play on words in the title of the work; on the shutter the artist depicts his own father but on the canvas beneath he depicts Gandhi, sometimes endearingly termed 'Bapu', the father of the nation.

'In recent years I have allowed the world to enter my studio. I have painted as if at a crossroads - where East meets West, the popular and the naive meet the high classical or the very personal autobiographical images overlaps the universal icon. From these apparently anarchic hybrids I hope to understand the nature of creativity.  Creativity earlier meant that I was a link in a long chain of art makers from the ancient to the post modern. The inclinations and the obsessions have moved. Almost dramatically the earth has moved beneath my feet.  As my notions of security and beauty have changed a deluge of images has hit me. Living in a nation seeped in poverty maybe it's unavoidable.  Death, decay corruption compromise, struggle are not distant metaphors for the fall of man. These are real right here, lived with, metallic, omnipresent. Metal is a roller shutter guard to a shop.  Opening or closing it is a symbol of daily grind. It evokes a feeling of time passing, cruel industrial sounds, the lonely labourer the glamour and glitz of the city...The city for me is the chief inspiration.  The overlapping of contradictory images which I paint are born here.  Constant contradiction is truth.  Imagine the earth shifting beneath one's feet perpetually.'

The autobiographical nature of Father follows a series of works by the artist from the mid 1990's that address similar concerns, questioning his role as an artist and the role within the microcosm of his family.  He looks at the relationship to his family in works like Letter from a Father (1994) and his identity as an artist and an Indian through works like Gangavatarna (1998) which is inspired by the work of the same name by Raja Ravi Varma. In the current work his most recurrent themes of personal identity and art historical ancestry are combined and metaphorically and literally overlapped. As with most of his works from this period the artist captures the energy of India, celebrating the tenuous balance between the rarefied images of 'fine' art and the popular images of mass culture, between globalization and localized traditions, between public and private history.

John Brunetti states, 'the disparities between Indian public facades and private realities are dramatically revealed as the viewer raises one of Dodiya's shutters. Accompanied by the staccato rhythm of raising the accordion door is the immediate shock of the garish, surreal composition beneath.  All of Dodiya's shutter works are constructed in a manner requiring the viewer to physically, as well as metaphorically remove one layer of public history to see another version of events behind it.'