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March 2005 New York - Bose Pacia Gallery presents
Cracks in Mondrian, an exhibition of new paintings by
Atul Dodiya from March 3rd through April 16th, 2005. The gallery is located at 508 West 26th Street on the 11th Floor, in New York City. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 12 to 6 pm and by appointment. There will be an opening reception on March 3rd from 6 to 8pm. The public is invited.
Atul Dodiya's work is often autobiographical and intrinsically political in its intentions. In this series, Dodiya appropriates nine grid paintings of Mondrian, interlacing cultural references from India. The ensuing fusion of modernist abstraction with a historical narrative determines the identity of each painting, transforming them into individual maps. The artist borrows nine maps of Indian states, and their colloquial names of the era, from an 18th century book entitled Maps of Mughal India rendered by Jean-Baptiste Gentil, a French diplomat and cartographer.
The maps become points of navigation between the historical and the contemporary, the local and the global, and are expressed through an art that is both aesthetic and ethnographic. As a combination of painting and sculpture-installation, Dodiya takes pleasure in achieving an impasto effect by melding marble dust with quick drying acrylic paint. The use of a drain pipe attached to each painting, contrasts itself with the pristine universal order that embodies Mondrian's work. This juxtaposition also serves to anchor the utopian perfection of modernism to today's mundane reality and fractured global existence. As startling visual conundrums, they arouse in us the uncertainties that come from the displacement of a familiar experience.
Atul Dodiya is an innovator for whom all art is contemporary. In his practice, artists eavesdrop on each other across time and the re-vision of visual imagery results in re-invention and ultimately, a new creation.
Atul Dodiya studied at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. His work has been exhibited internationally including, Tate Modern, London (2001); Japan Foundation Asia Center (2001); Kunsthalle, Vienna (2002); Reina Sofia, Madrid (2002); House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003); Musio Temporario, Lisbon (2004).
Mr. Dodiya's work is included in the current exhibition entitled Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India at the Asia Society in New York.