Growing up in Mumbai, artist Atul Dodiya was fascinated by cinema posters, calendar art, and the lively street visuals around him. Over time, he realised that painting was the best way for him to explore ideas about history, identity, and the world around him. Art became his natural way of understanding and expressing his thoughts. His worldview is shaped by this. It is neither stridently agitational nor comfortably neutral; it is reflective, layered, and insistently democratic. Drawing from figures like Gandhi, cinema, poetry, and art history, he revisits the idea of India as a plural, argumentative space, often meditating on violence, memory, censorship, and the fragility of institutions. His politics lie in nuance: a defence of secular, liberal values; a scepticism of absolutism; and a belief that art must remain a site of ethical inquiry in turbulent times.
In the last four decades, a common thread that has tied together all of the 67-year-old artist’s works is not similarity in style but the sheer uniqueness. No two artworks feel similar. No two shows overlap. What remains a constant is a conscious attempt to do something different. It is no surprise then that his latest exhibition, The Gatecrasher, stands to be completely different from his previous works. The show centres on the question—what happens to a viewer when they see a work of art? The artist recalls a moment of “seeing” from 1992. “When I was a French government scholar, I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and came across The Night Watch by the Dutch painter Rembrandt. At that moment, while looking at the painting, I completely forgot myself. I don’t know for how long I was standing in front of it. ” He laughs, “A security guard had to finally tap on my shoulder to say that the museum was closing.”
Inspired by Matisse and amazed by Picasso’s ability to make each artwork feel “unbelievably great”, he draws a visual language that informs his influences in poetry. Mumbai, for its vastness of experiences, has been a special trigger for him. He says, “Here, you see the rich and poor in the same frame. The noisy areas balance out the quiet nooks. So my ability to work with varied themes and mediums comes from living in Mumbai.”
His roller shutter works, treating the metal object as a metaphor, first came out in the year 2000 in response to curfews in Mumbai. More recently, after watching films during the lockdown, his series Dr. Banerjee in Dr. Kulkarni’s Nursing Home and Other Paintings 2020-2022 was born as the pastel renditions of screen grabs from films, captured at Dodiya’s own decisive moment. Dodiya says, “I wish to walk with playfulness on a path that never stops surprising. I want to be baffled by my own creation. If I am working on something that I already know, then what’s the point?”
Along with the act of viewing, references to existing works of art are central to The Gatecrasher. Rendered with charcoal and a thin layer of umber oil paint, his painting Faletti’s Hotel, Lahore (Amrita 1937) is reminiscent of sepia-toned photographs and features artist Amrita Sher-Gil looking at her artworks. Dodiya expresses, “I wish to explore—can existing paintings be given a new voice?” His painting Always Looking features American novelist John Updike, with his hands folded at the back superimposed with the broken sword hand from Picasso’s Guernica.
Dodiya describes himself as an artist who sits on a wooden log flowing in a river. Wherever the water flows, he follows it. In the painting The Deliverance, the artist himself appears as a shadow. “It was not planned but came in with the stream of consciousness. There are many mes within me which I allow to spring off in my art. This is the only painting where I appear, but Picasso has said that each painting is a self-portrait.”
In the painting The Gatecrasher, elements appear as surprises—a dog, a hollow face, a falling parrot borrowed from artist Gieve Patel, a friend he misses immensely. To Dodiya, anyone can be a gatecrasher. “The viewer is a gatecrasher. As I am the first viewer of my work, I am a gatecrasher too.”