Art | A time for reflection

In the soft-hued watercolour Paper Storm (2010), a tiny woman howls at a painting, threatening to stab it with a pencil. Pieces of white paper flutter around her. The figure and image emblazoned on the comparatively large painting appear to be representations of the same person: Anju Dodiya. “It’s the do or die—the challenge of a blank page,” explains the Mumbai-based artist.

Room for Erasures, Dodiya’s forthcoming solo at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, offers more such musings on art, artifice and identity in the form of large watercolours and 14 photo collages: “It’s about how one’s work and life overlap; it’s about new beginnings,” Dodiya says. “On a computer screen, you press ‘refresh’, but in life there is lots of layering going on. As a painter, you always question yourself—can I start again, can I start afresh?”

Like Dodiya, her paintings are obsessively self-questioning. Her visage crops up consistently in her works, with the paintings often parading more than one avatar of the artist at a time. In Pink Scream (2012), Dodiya sits crossed-legged on a cushion, paintbrush in hand, and has a conversation with a large bust of… herself. This big-headed Dodiya has Medusa-like snaky black hair.

Yet, for all their preoccupations with selfhood, it would be misguided to assume that Dodiya’s images are strictly autobiographical. Her split personalities represent various facets of creativity, and have come to be seen as a new way of looking at identity in Indian art following economic liberalization. In his 2004 lead essay for the ART India magazine, critic Girish Shahane used Dodiya’s first solo show at Chemould in 1991 to mark a watershed in discussions of the theme, arguing that Dodiya represented a generation who “treat identity in an intellectual, ironic manner, imitating images, rather than the world at large.”

The giant watercolour Utamaro’s Promise (2012) is, arguably, the pivot of the show. Here, a diminutive Dodiya kneels humbly while painting a vast image of a gorgeously feathered bird with vicious-looking claws—and the calm face of Kitagawa Utamaro. Famous for his images of The Floating World (that is, the demi-monde of Tokyo’s performers and courtesans), Dodiya’s depiction of Utamaro as a giant eagle is both a tribute and gentle mockery. Her carefully controlled patterns create an ungainly man-beast or, as she would have it, “elegance explodes into violence”.

Yet, if Dodiya’s solo at Chemould just offers more of what we’ve come to associate with her oeuvre—self-reflection, Japonaiserie and Samurai-inspired aggression—it also promises the reintroduction of humour on to her stage. Which is a welcome about-face after the much discussed (because it went to the Venice Biennale in 2009) and much-pilloried series of prints, All Night I Shall Gallop (2008)—maudlin ruminations inspired by poet and novelist Sylvia Plath.

The mini-Dodiya in Arachne, with her swishy-embroidered skirt, resembles a manga character. The spider’s web she is busy unravelling looks like it has been stitched on. Are the allusions to weaving (often seen as “women’s work”) making a point? American feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s celebrated craft and references to the female body; tropes that Delhi-based Mithu Sen and Bangalore resident Sheela Gowda make much of.

Dodiya says with characteristic self-contradiction: “I would not like to be called a feminist artist. At the same time I would not say that I am not one. I am concerned with feminist issues, I won’t take nonsense, but I am an artist and I do my job. We don’t ask men if they are feminist artists.” We guess not.

Room for Erasures, at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, from 24 September-27 October.

Write to lounge@livemint.com