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New Delhi: Leading contemporary artist Atul Dodiya uses the shutters of shops in Mumbai as the backdrop of his art works that combine snapshots of the city's changing urban landscape, references to history of classical painting, icons like Mahatma Gandhi, Hindu gods and even filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak to create complex surreal compositions.
According to him, downed shutters became symbolic of the city he calls home whenever Mumbai was under siege like during riots or curfew, specially in the last decade. Twelve of his large-format oil paintings on canvas - a new collection of calibrated shutters - are on display at the Vadehra Art Gallery in an exhibition "Malevich Matters and Other Shutters", which opened in the capital on March 5.
"The shutters are symbolic of all that are on the ground. My earlier shutters, the ones which I experimented with in 1999-2000 were operational shutters - a kind of conceptual solid art - that could move up and down and had a definite feel. I used enamel paint on metal roller coasters," Dodiya told the media here.
Operating in a conceptual space between painting, sculpture and theatre, Dodiya's first generation shutters were real metal roller doors that sometimes moved up to reveal acrylic interiors painted in varnish and gold powder or rolled down to form hard metal surfaces for hand-painted images.
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