ATUL DODIYA: THE POP ARTIST
Atul Dodiya wants to be remembered as the Mohammed Rafi of the Indian art world. With his playful repertoire and consistent output, the artist already justifies the comparison
Exhibited at Delhi’s Bikaner House last week, Atul Dodiya’s new series of watercolours and textured laminates has only furthered his reputation. At 62, Dodiya is one of India’s leading artists.
His art provides amusing commentary on pop culture, cinema, socio-political issues and on the nature of art itself. Like the great Andy Warhol, Dodiya works out of a large atelier—in suburban Mumbai in this case. With assistants and staff on standby, it resembles a new-age factory. For much of last year, though, the pandemic forced this art manufacturing unit
to down its shutters.
Working from home, Dodiya decided to produce one A3-sized watercolour a day. Having started on March 22, 2020, he has amassed around 290 paintings. “Generally,” he says, “my paintings have a strong narrative in terms of references, quotations, of homage to cinema and literature. I then develop another narrative using this existing one. This time, it was all about my own free-flowing imagination.”
Owing to its limitless possibility and innate purity, Dodiya has painted in watercolour since the beginning of his career in the 1980s. Mostly set against a pastoral landscape, the lockdown works depict a couple who look like they are talking to trees and clouds. “I realised that since I wasn’t able to go out, I was bringing nature into my art.”
When asked how he would like to be remembered by history, he had once remarked, “As the Mohammed Rafi of Indian modern art.” For this selfconfessed Bollywood fan, a typical lockdown day would begin with two hours of old Hindi film music from the late 1940s to 1960s on ‘Radio Ceylon’. He believes there is a close relationship between music and painting: “Art has its own rhythm, pauses and pitch.”
Dodiya’s mind is obviously restless. He floats from one influence to another. He also spares no effort in embedding his art with some ‘meta’ motifs. Think Quentin Tarantino with a brush. An outsider might think of Dodiya as ‘unhinged’ when he hears him talk about having “imaginary conversations” with Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp and others, but it’s this playful eccentricity that gives him his visual vocabulary—a mix of the weird and the everyday, a world where enchanting fantasies are superimposed on precise realism.
In one of Dodiya’s more famous paintings, Mahatma Gandhi chances upon a Joseph Beuys installation. So, is Dodiya a trickster or is he the troubadour of our pop culture age? Well, it’s complicated. “I’m probably the most confused artist ever. From the medieval period to postmodern art, I like everything,” he says. Some of this confusion might be the impact of Mumbai and its “diverse realities that run simultaneously”, he says. “There’s a recurring onslaught of visuals and sounds unique to Mumbai. I guess being a part of the city helps me take many shifts.” Dodiya finds art and its philosophical purpose endlessly fascinating, but he never loses sight of the fact that life and relationships are greater than all else. That is perhaps why a sense of humour and lightness are fundamental to him. With their quirky titles, his paintings sometimes appear to be an inside joke, but once you unpick the subject matter and context, you see the richness of its content. All great artists have a particular style perfected over time. A decade ago, Dodiya was worried he was all over the place: “Mine was more like a student’s attitude. But when I tried having a theme, I couldn’t sustain it. It took me years to convince myself that there could be many themes, methods, depths and realities. Once this clarity came, I stopped arguing with myself.” Two years ago, when Dodiya’s daughter Biraaj returned from the US after completing her art studies, the only advice he offered her was—“There’s no substitute for hard work. Don’t take the world seriously and never stop laughing.” Today, the House of Dodiya is full of artists. His wife Anju has her own dedicated following. The ‘power couple of Indian art’ are celebrated for their vastly different styles. Unlike Dodiya’s bouncy eloquence, Anju’s intense, self-expressive art can be unsettling. He says, “The turmoil and emotions her work generates is disturbing, but that kind of disturbance is very good for a work of art.”
Dodiya’s eccentricity gives him his visual vocabulary—a mix of the weird and everyday