Important Notice

“When you work on paper, confronting that white is a terribly fearful thing. With textile, something’s there already, and I have to interact with the textures. It made the painting process more carefree for me. And there was a great pleasure in working with the textures and also kind of fighting them with the paint. It was great fun. Also the mattresses, when they are up against the wall, the bulge has a terrific physical presence” (Anju Dodiya... “When you work on paper, confronting that white is a terribly fearful thing. With textile, something’s there already, and I have to interact with the textures. It made the painting process more carefree for me. And there was a great pleasure in working with the textures and also kind of fighting them with the paint. It was great fun. Also the mattresses, when they are up against the wall, the bulge has a terrific physical presence” (Anju Dodiya in conversation with Gieve Patel, Anju Dodiya, Bose Pacia exhibition catalogue, 2006, unpaginated).

For Anju Dodiya, then, using a mattress as her surface is akin to working on a painting that is already in process, rather than beginning a new piece. It has texture and presence, and influences the subject of the work done on it. As part of a bed, the mattress pushed Dodiya to contemplate her paintings in terms of “bodies and relationships and sleep and dreams” (Ibid.).

The present lot, one of the first mattresses the artist painted, began as a portrayal of the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, with their tresses entwined, albeit through Dodiya’s characteristic dramatization of the self. As artist and surface interacted, however, the piece took on a more personal aspect, echoing the artist’s concern with arduous escapes, particularly from the violence of her own creative process. In this context, the artist juxtaposes the restrained state of insomnia with the freedom of dreams in this three dimensional piece, perhaps suggesting that the former is a necessary, albeit unpleasant step in the direction of the latter. Here, Dodiya’s sleep has taken flight like Shiva’s golden deer at the upper left, and the fingerprint-like whorls of the mattress’ velvet surface encage the different iterations of the artist-protagonist in their sleepless labyrinth.

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site