ATUL DODIYA (B. 1959)

Atul Dodiya first chose the common shop shutter as a medium in 1999 - 2000. Alluding to India's commercial capital - Mumbai, also his home town, the works included a careful juxtaposition of images on the shutter and canvas, playing with the notions of open/closed, private/public and what one chooses to reveal or hide. The narrative of these three dimensional works change and depends upon whether the metal shutter is open, closed or partially down.

Almost ten years later Dodiya created a new series entitled Malevich Matters & Other Shutters. "These images of roller shutters are neither austere conceptualist devices, nor abstract depictions of hardware pared down to its mechanical logic. Rather, they are themselves Dodiya paintings: images shaped from images, hand crafted from surprising collocations of pictorial and textual data drawn from diverse sources, surfaces annotated with extracts from the artist's copious private archive of references." (R. Hoskote, Dodiya Standard Time, New Delhi, p. 51)