Atul Dodiya

Photo courtesy Bodhi Arts

Atul Dodiya, "Sabari shaking Mondrian"

Photo courtesy Bodhi Arts

Atul Dodiya, "The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe" at Bodhi Arts

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While he first became known in the early 1990s for hyperrealist paintings depicting middle-class Indian life, he has since then explored many diverse paths, including vitrine-like installations and critically acclaimed paintings executed on the surface of the metal roller shutters used to protect storefronts.

His work is infused with a strong sense of both the history of Western art and the myths, folklore and popular culture of India. Often, these two worlds collide in his work in amusing and instructive ways: a figure from the Hindu epic Ramayana, for example, tugs on a line from a Mondrian painting as if it were a tree (Sabari Shaking Mondrian); in another work, Gandhia frequent subject in his workappears next to Joseph Beuysin an especially perceptive comment on the similarities between Gandhis protest techniques and Conceptual art.

His latest exhibition, The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe (Sabari in Her Youth: After Nandalal Bose), is inspired by the Ramayana. In the 31 works on view, Dodiya focuses on Sabari, a minor character from a low-caste tribe who spends a lifetime waiting for one encounter with the works hero, Lord Ram.

Dodiya created these very-mixed-media works on paper during a residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. During his six-week stay there, he collaborated with American papermaker Richard Hungerford and Japanese printmaker Eitaro Ogawa, learning to make and manipulate the paper pulp that dominates the works.

The exhibition, on view through Oct. 28, inaugurates Bodhi Arts first New York space. The gallery, which shows contemporary Indian art, has branches in Mumbai, New Delhi and Singapore.

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The exhibition title, The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe (Sabari in Her Youth: After Nandalal Bose) references one of Indias best-known artists. What influence has Bose (1883-1966) had on your development as an artist?

The range in which Bose painted images was quite phenomenal; there was no single style he followed. As a young artist in art school in the 1980s, I noticed that all the artists who were painting then in India all had a strong styleas if you had to have a single style and then follow that all your life. This is something I strongly deny. You cant [be limited to one style], particularly living in city like Bombay, where so much is happening simultaneously. So many diverse situations, emotions and feelings coexist in Bombay. So I started juxtaposing styles, and in that context, I feel that I give homage to Bose.

Sabari, the mythic figure at the heart of this new work, plays a minor role in the Hindu epic Ramayana, but youve made her the star of your new works. Why?

Of course, the Ramayanas stories are about the Lord Ram, his family and his whole journey. But while the story is about him, there are many small characters within this huge epic. Sabari is a very minor characterbut a very strong one. One of the best episodes of the Ramayana tells about Sabaris waiting, until she is a very old woman, to greet Lord Ram one time before she dies. And thats the image with which everyone is familiar in India: Sabari as an old lady with white hair and bent from the back.

So when I saw in 1998 a series by Bose of three paintings that he did of Sabarione in her old age, one in middle age and one in her youthI was quite fascinated. That was the trigger for this series. When Sabari was in her youth, Ram wasnt even born yet, so I began thinking, What was she doing then? As a contemporary artist working today, one is quite naturally drawn to a character who is minor, someone who has not been given enough importance or proper due. I thought that Sabari was extremely sensitive, extremely vulnerable, a person with lots of feeling for fellow human beings.

Lets talk about this decision to show Sabari as a young and sensual woman. I imagine there was some risk in treating this beloved, but completely asexualized figure, in such an iconoclastic way.