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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Anju Dodiya’s exquisite whimsy
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Anju Dodiya’s exquisite whimsy

The artist's new show is about veins and viscera, gore and guts

Anju Dodiya. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/MintPremium
Anju Dodiya. Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

If you walk into Anju Dodiya’s new exhibition at New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery with even the ghost of an awareness of her earlier work, you will be in for a surprise. A macabre one at that.

For an artist who has drawn heavily on the self-image in the past for her paintings, Dodiya departs strikingly in her choice of the dominant iconography of Imagined Immortals, her latest body of work. Instead of the human form, clothed in flesh and blood, we encounter veins and viscera, gore and guts, grinning skeletons and stray body parts. The flesh is ripped apart with clinical precision, opened out like an accordion, creating a complex circuit with the world.

“I wanted to make these images look pretty," Dodiya says, a statement that highlights the curious irony of the approach. The subject of this series is far from beautiful, focusing on everything we want to keep away from our thoughts, even though, visually, it may look stunning. The body is unspooled, its secrets are probed and, in some instances, mutated into strange forms—adding credence to the title of the show. These characters who populate the walls of the gallery are as much rooted to the world of circumstance as woven out of the artist’s exquisite whimsy.

Sitting on the first floor of the gallery, Dodiya traces the archaeology of this series: 17th century Dutch paintings; British writer David Mitchell’s novel, The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, set in 18th century Japan; 19th century medical manuals from France; and Japanese ukiyo-e prints. But in the end, it is Dodiya’s private mythology that transforms her mixed-media work into something rich and strange.

“My visual language has been profoundly influenced by movies," Dodiya says. We go on to talk about classic European cinema, especially the films of Ingmar Bergman. “I love (The) Silence," adds Dodiya, referring to the Swedish director’s 1963 masterpiece. “I find a dark pessimism coexisting with a keen love for life in his films." She reads voraciously, indiscriminately, has been deeply absorbed in cinema since her student days at the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai, but the genesis of her work is not always self-conscious.

The human body is unspooled in Dodiya’s Imagined Immortals
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The human body is unspooled in Dodiya’s Imagined Immortals

We talk about the little boy in Bergman’s Silence, one of the three protagonists, who is largely left to himself in a hotel in a strange town. While his mother and aunt subject each other to bouts of emotional torture to settle obscure scores going back to their past as children, the boy sets out on his own adventures, spends empty days running into a group of eccentrics, such as a troupe of clowns who make him wear a dress, and brings lightness and amusement to an otherwise morbid and nihilistic story.

A similar mapping of melancholy and mysticism is manifested in Dodiya’s work. The clean, hard geometry of her forms is softened by the occasional splash of colour. A grimace in one image turns into a grin, the anguish of creation gives way to the euphoria of completion. Once again, Dodiya draws from Bergman to explain this tussle between the stolid and the fluid: the manner in which “deliberate harshness" is thrown into relief by the “wonder of solitude", as she puts it.

Dodiya also invokes the visual analogy of the 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, especially his muted, but intensely potent use of colour. “While you may be arrested by the paleness of his palette, suddenly all the energy explodes in a burst," she says. It is a mode that recurs in her paintings as well. And in what is perhaps the most beautiful work in the show, a single pearl-like teardrop rests in the corner of an eye, with a cluster of other eyes stacked below it. The composition alludes to Girl With A Pearl Earring, the immortal masterpiece Vermeer is most obviously associated with.

The immortality that the title of Dodiya’s show refers to thus goes beyond its immediate frame of reference. We are made to witness not only creatures of fantastical shapes and origins, much like those that Roman poet Ovid describes in his epic Metamorphoses, but also the persistence of the memory of the Old Masters, and the afterlife of great art, which lend another dimension to the word in her title.

Among the immortals, apart from the pearl, there is also a tremendous yet serene wave that seems to creep up on a painter at work, much like a shroud. It is a nod to the Japanese ukiyo-e painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai’s work, subtle, poised between revealing and concealing the figure of the artist. It conveys the diverse, often contrarian, dynamics of Dodiya’s aesthetics: the stillness and the turbulence, her reticence and the impulse to reach out.

Imagined Immortals is on till 14 February, 11am-7pm (closed on Sundays and public holidays), at Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53, Defence Colony, New Delhi.

Somak Ghoshal is a New Delhi-based editor and writer.

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Published: 30 Jan 2015, 04:10 PM IST
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