Atul Dodiya (b. 1959, Mumbai, India) trained at the Sir J.J. School of Art, 1982, and École des Beaux- Arts, Paris, 1991–92. He has had more than 32 solo shows worldwide, and has participated in the India Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale (2019); 1st Kochi–Muziris Biennale (2012); 7th Asia Pacific Triennale, Brisbane (2012); Biennale Jogja XI (2011); 3rd Moscow Biennale (2009); 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008); Documenta12 (2007); 51st Venice Biennal (2005); and the 1st Yokohoma Triennal (2001). His work is included in several prominent collections, including the Ishara Art Foundation and the Prabhakar Collection, Dubai; the Herwitz Collection, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon; Detroit Institute of Arts, USA; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania, Australia; Burger Collection, Berlin and Hong Kong; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, Mumbai; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; and Museum M+, Hong Kong, among others.
Atul Dodiya lives and works in Mumbai, India.
The artist became known in the nineties for his hyperrealist paintings depicting middle-class Indian life and for his watercolour and oil series on Mahatma Gandhi. His narratives are populated by diverse traditions in painting, the written word, images from the media, saints and legends, national history, political events, traumata, and autobiographical narratives.
Through his paintings and assemblages, Atul Dodiya engages with both political and art history in a way that entwines global/public memory and local/personal experience.
The work ‘Rubai’ is a rubaiyat from celebrated Persian philosopher and poet, Umar Khayyam, in which Dodiya has used only the first two lines from the original text that reads:
‘We are dolls while Heaven in the player with dolls, in a real sense and not metaphorically. We (are allowed to) play on the sage (lit. carpet) of existence and go into the box of non-existence one by one.’
Rubai is a style of poetry, used to describe a Persian quatrain, or its derivative form in English and other languages. The plural form of the word, rubaiyat, is used to describe a collection of such quatrains. Here Dodiya appears concerned with the tapestry of language in a specific cultural context, but in exploring its unique elements attempts to get at universal thoughts about the threads of life, and how all existence is tied to non-existence, as is being-ness to non-being-ness.
In its low chromatic order, and highly abstract use of calligraphy, collage, architectural detail, the shutter packs in an association, abstracted and delicate, that marks a turn in the artist’s oeuvre.