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Lot 45

 

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Atul Dodiya's artistic career traces its initial roots to the late 1980s, when the artist showed a collection of large, photorealist canvases at his first solo exhibition in Mumbai. Since then, Dodiya's practice has metamorphosed several times, concurrently refreshing and complicating his immense artistic vocabulary in the artist's quest to understand the nature of creativity. Dodiya's constant drive to dislocate and invigorate his idiom, his... Atul Dodiya's artistic career traces its initial roots to the late 1980s, when the artist showed a collection of large, photorealist canvases at his first solo exhibition in Mumbai. Since then, Dodiya's practice has metamorphosed several times, concurrently refreshing and complicating his immense artistic vocabulary in the artist's quest to understand the nature of creativity. Dodiya's constant drive to dislocate and invigorate his idiom, his command over various media and the deep archive of sources he draws from in his visionary body of work have rendered him a pioneer amongst a generation of postmodern, global artists from India.

The present lot, titled Fallacy and painted in 2003, is part of a series of works by the artist "…dealing with loss: personal loss as well as the loss of secular, humanist ideals in contemporary India, exemplified most recently in the barbarism of the genocide directed against Muslims in the state of Gujarat at the beginning of 2002. These concerns are the thread that links a diverse body of his recent work, ranging from watercolours on the life of Mahatma Gandhi (An Artist of Non-Violence, 1999), to painted rolling shutters dealing with aspects of violence and loss (2000-01)" (Under the Skin of Simulation: Three Contemporary Painters, The Fine Art Resource exhibition catalogue, 2003, not paginated).

Speaking about this painting, Chaitanya Sambrani notes that it is about "…the ultimate denial of the promise of redemption. [The artist] describes this work in terms of the triumph of darkness. A weighing scale made of human bones carries in the lower of its two pans, a house seemingly made from inescapable, oppressive darkness. On the lighter side, on a metal stand presumably from a museum, are the severed arms of Vishnu (the preserver from the Hindu trinity), from a Cambodian sculpture. The arms of the preserver can no longer redeem the world of its darkness, while the painter as witness inscribes his name (in Urdu) in the form of a meat hook hanging from the scales. One is reminded of the promise Vishnu, as Krishna, makes to Arjuna in the Bhagvad Gita, 'Wherever dharma [the true path] is embattled…I shall manifest myself [to redeem the world].'…In the midst of this play of redemption and damnation, a disembodied pair of hands casts the haunting shadow of a dog/wolf on the 'background', Dodiya's tongue-in-cheek salute to illusionism, as well as a marker of dread in the painting" (Ibid.).

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