Atul Dodiya
Mahatma and the Masters
Galerie Daniel Templon is opening the season with the first Brussels exhibition of work by one of the pionneers of contemporary Indian art, Atul Dodiya. The artist has created a fascinating new show with a series of previously unseen hybrid works combining oil painting and photography. The figure of Gandhi is central to the artist’s latest project, which questions the notions of modernity and universalism.
Atul Dodiya establishes a dialogue between two simultaneous moments in history: the fight for Indian independence between 1910 and 1947 and the founding of artistic modernity in Europe. Each work combines an episode of Gandhi’s struggle with contemporary creations from artists such as Picasso, Mondrian and Malevitch. The complex fusion of painting and photography challenges the distrinction between copy and original, between Eastern and Western tradition. Atul Dodiya was the first artist to to build bridges between Indian and Western art.
The experience gained during a one-year course at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris during the early 1990s was key to his artistic development. A member of the same generation as his renowned contemporaries, Subodh Guptah and Sudarshan Shetty, he excels in juxtaposing popular culture with cinematic and literary references. Behind the lyricism and the humour, politics remains one of his core preoccupations. With his dazzling capacity for self-reinvention, Atul Dodiya has worked in a wide array of styles, ever ready to embark on (invariably successful) new experiments, from his early photo-realism to his works on metal shutters that sealed his international reputation.
Evening walk with family, Juhu Beach, Bombay, May 1944
The artist
Atul Dodiya was born in 1959 in Mumbai where he lives and works. One of the pioneers of contemporary Indian art, he builds bridges between the history of Indian and Western art. His references to popular culture, cinema and literature point to an underlying political analysis of the aspirations of the Indian middle class and the impact of globalisation on their traditions. Atul Dodiya uses a broad spectrum of media, from his early photo-realism to the works on metal shutters that sealed his international reputation.
