Chemould artists: Museum acquisitions⁣

Atul Dodiya’s “Meditation (with open eyes)” was acquired by the Tate Modern in 2014. The works are currently part of the free display at their galleries in the section: “Artist Studio” that investigate the processes artists use to make artworks, and how our responses are integral to the piece.⁣⁣⁣

Dodiya has assembled a range of portraits and objects, which relate to his upbringing and artistic development. They are arranged in glass cabinets that resemble museum showcases but also recall personal displays of souvenirs and sentimental items that are particularly common in Indian homes. ⁣⁣⁣

⁣⁣⁣The cabinets also act as shrines, celebrating the lives of these inspirational figures.⁣⁣⁣

⁣⁣⁣The portraits above the cupboard include artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso, and Rabindranath Tagore. Along with these artists, portraits are portraits of Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna. ⁣⁣⁣

⁣Dodiya’s world is made up of art history, popular culture, history, film, poetry, and literature. He is unabashed in combining the worlds that inspire him in creating new juxtapositions.⁣ The objects range from the sacred to the everyday. ⁣⁣⁣

⁣⁣⁣Two of the cabinets include a tribute to the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. They relate to Dodiya’s first direct encounter with Mondrian’s paintings during a visit to Tate Modern in 2001 when he saw the faint cracks in Mondrian’s work (invisible in reproductions). Almost at the moment of looking at the works, he heard about the devastating earthquake in his ancestral state, Gujarat. Many years later he made a body of works called “Cracks in Mondrian” – associating that moment at the Tate Modern when the two incidents impacted him as greatly they did.