About
Indian contemporary artist, born 1959 in Mumbai; one of India's foremost painters, known for his shutter paintings, Gandhi works and richly referential, genre-spanning practice. Based in Mumbai.
Born in 1959 in Ghatkopar, Mumbai, into a middle-class Gujarati family, Atul Dodiya trained at the Sir J.J. School of Art and, decisively, spent 1991–92 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His early acclaim came as a figurative, photorealist painter; 'The Bombay Buccaneer' (1994), a self-portrait as James Bond, marked his break toward irony and layered reference.
In response to the Bombay riots of the 1990s he turned both to the figure of Gandhi - in works like 'An Artist of Non-Violence' (1999) - and, from 2001, to painting on the metal roller-shutters that shielded shops during curfew, combining Pop Art, mythology, film posters and historic figures. His installation 'Broken Branches', inspired by Gandhi's Porbandar home, was shown at the India Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Across more than four decades he has had some thirty solo shows and mid-career retrospectives at the Japan Foundation (Tokyo), the Reina Sofía (Madrid) and Cincinnati, with recent exhibitions in Paris, Detroit and Sydney. His work is held by the Centre Pompidou, the Tate, the Guggenheim and the NGMA. A Sanskriti awardee, he lives and works in Mumbai with the painter Anju Dodiya.
The artistry
Dodiya is a restless, erudite painter who moves between photorealism, abstraction and assemblage, layering references from Mondrian, Duchamp and Matisse to Ravi Varma, Bollywood posters and Gujarati poetry. His best-known works - paintings on the metal roller-shutters of Mumbai shopfronts - grew out of the Bombay riots, collapsing the line between street and gallery, public and private; and his long engagement with Gandhi turns the personal and the political into a layered visual history of modern India.
[Atlas Assessment] A blue-chip Indian contemporary painter with major museum standing; relevant for museum and gallery partnerships, retrospectives and acquisitions, and programming on art history, the freedom struggle or Mumbai's cultural life. Engagements are exhibitions, talks and commissions rather than performances.
[Atlas Assessment] Dodiya is among the central figures of contemporary Indian painting - an artist who helped revive figuration, who made the Mumbai shutter into an icon of contemporary art, and whose work weaves the freedom struggle, art history and everyday Indian life into a single dense fabric. His international museum presence makes him one of the most globally visible Indian painters.