Atul Dodiya

Atul Dodiya was born in 1959 in Ghatkopar, Mumbai, and lives and works in the city with his wife, the painter Anju Dodiya. He trained at the Sir J. J. School of Art, began exhibiting in the early 1980s, and spent 1991 and 1992 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris on a French government scholarship.

Gandhi became his most lasting subject, first in paintings such as Lamentation (1997) and the watercolour Bapu at Rene Block Gallery, New York, 1974 (1998). An Artist of Non-Violence, a series of large watercolours shown at Gallery Chemould in 1999, tells Gandhi’s life through small things: receipts, pages from his diary.

The shutter paintings followed around 2000. During the curfews of the Bombay riots in the 1990s the city’s shops stayed shut behind metal roller shutters, and Dodiya took the shutter itself as a surface. In B for Bapu (2001) a honeycomb screen lets Gandhi show through whether the shutter is up or down; the image comes from a photograph of him sipping honey and water at the end of a fast.

Broken Branches, an installation of 2002 drawn from Gandhi’s thought, was shown in the India Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. One painting, The Wall, is a tribute to the cricketer Rahul Dravid. He received the Sanskriti Award in 1995.