German Measles: Kiefer's Cell

Atul Dodiya’s allegorical collages fuse fragments of art historical masterpieces with moments of Pop Culture, current events and his own autobiography. Beginning his career with a straightforward and cleverly deadpan realist style, Dodiya moved away from the literal in the mid-1990s towards a more fragmented and multilayered technique as seen in this painting. Immensely conscious of history, his works reflect his impressive knowledge of both current events and ancient religions, and he quotes freely from the recesses of both Western and Indian art traditions. Capitalising on the Post-Modern tendency of ironic juxtaposition, Dodiya often includes the vocabulary of Western contemporary art as seen in this painting from the series German Measles, which references the monumental paintings of 1930s interiors created by the German Artist Anselm Keifer. For Dodiya, “There are many reasons to incorporate images already existing in images in one’s own work. ‘When you see an image and immediately recognise it, it is because you already know it well and the history behind it, so the entire package is already in existence. When such a well known image reappears in my painting, I try to give it another context, another and unfamiliar dimension in which to see it. It is a jugglery on both the artist’s and the viewer’s part. The joy of recognising a familiar image is one thing, but trying to locate it and make sense of it in another context makes the viewer more engaged, often intellectually’.” (Atul Dodiya in Converstation with Nancy Adajania, Atul Dodiya, New York, 2013, p. 119)

“Dodiya’s preoccupations with the interweaving of national history and autobiography is also expressed in the multi-panel series titled German Measles (1999). At the thematic centre of the series stand two ironic self-portraits: the artist as eager apprentice to the oracular tradition of art, hearing voices from the heaven of critical aesthetes; and the artist as hero imprisoned and martyred by taste and the market. Formally, Dodiya expresses his continuing fascination with the works of such post-World War II German artists as Beuys, Kiefer, Polke, Richter and Immendorf, with its themes of holocaust, tragic memory and heroic but melancholy regeneration. The medical-sounding title of the series, German Measles, is a pun through which Dodiya playfully suggests the contagious nature of his enthusiasm for these artists. He inserts canonical images associated with Beuys, Polke and Kiefer into a flow of imagery tapped from the urban Indian fold art of the poster and the popular-magazine illustration. This vivid intersection between two radically different pictorial universes reflects Dodiya’s own dual nature as an artist who is comfortable both with museum art and popular culture.” (R. Hoskote, ‘Atul Dodiya’, Capital + Karma: Recent Positions on Indian Art, Berlin, 2003, pp. 136-138)