Vadehra Art Gallery is at Frieze No.9 in London with a two-person exhibition titled Due to an Obscure Reason by Mumbai-based artist Biraaj Dodiya and the late contemporary artist Gieve Patel (1940–2023) – curated by London-based Linsey Young, curator of the recent acclaimed exhibition Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement in the UK 1970–1990 at Tate Britain, London. This exhibition features a new body of work, including paintings and sculptures by Biraaj Dodiya and paintings by Gieve Patel.
In Due to an Obscure Reason, Dodiya presents a collection of paintings and vessel-like sculptures that enlist the body in its encounters. Her practice explores themes around ephemerality and uncertainty, investigating the many metaphors within the subject of landscape, its immensity as well as contemplations on the human condition. Linsey Young writes: ‘Biraaj Dodiya’s work is relentlessly unsteady, mutable. Painting shifts to
sculpture and back again, surfaces are raised and flattened on repeat, the layers and chronologies of paint hovering between landscape and abstraction. This representation of collapse; of the image, of the body, of the state, and our animal need to resist it, are central to her practice ... This assertion of a relationship to the body is crucial because her pursuit of the unknowable is not romantic musing but a direct and physical exploration of the lived experience and the relationship between body and mind ... Her process is centered around the durational aspect of making, of sitting with multiple canvases, building and erasing marks. The work is abstract but constantly slippery, almost coming to form before moving again out of our grasp, mirroring an internal flow of ideas or emotions, unceasing and tumultuous ... Of course, we cannot identify the stories behind the work, but the sense communicated is of handling darkness, of an attempt to make physical the fact of living with uncertainty and discomfort. Dodiya’s palette is one of muted brown, green, ochre and pink tones that offer us glimmers of a material or perhaps bodily world that evades our capture.’
Dodiya further turns to Gieve Patel as a source of comradeship and inspiration in the show, quoting a line from the latter’s poem – ‘All these insides / that have for a lifetime / raged and strained to understand’ – to contextualize the ‘connections between the absent body and landscape, and their possible interchangeability’ that have become significant in her work. Dodiya writes: ‘Finding joy in Gieve’s application of paint also means knocking one’s head against his Crushed Head and Mourners. Paint mimics the residue of the body. The violence of the encounter marks our spaces with grief and a quiet introspection. In my paintings, working towards the brink of losing form, focus, and familiarity, faceted surfaces generate new landscapes from fractured and adjoining topographies. Is it erosion or bruise, shoulder or cliff, entries or exits, soil or flesh? Is there a possibility of a cartography in paint that invents non-navigable terrains?’
Gieve Patel’s work is engaged in a persistence of forms and an earnest concern for the vulnerabilities of the human condition. His practice explores the psycho-social vagaries and complexities of the individual tied to the contemporary theatre of self and community, supplying his compositions with a narrative emplotment of the unexamined qualities of life, from cultural symbolisms and class entrenchments to the internal consequences of such experiences. Young further writes: ‘Dodiya has selected several paintings by friend and mentor Gieve Patel to show in conversation with her own work. The work of both artists shares a commitment to interrogating the complexities of the human experience and exploring the impact of physical, intellectual and emotional experiences on our lives.’
About the Artists
Born in Mumbai in 1993, BIRAAJ DODIYA is a visual artist based in Mumbai, India. She received her MFA from New York University in 2018, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Recent exhibitions include A Show of Hands | In Memoriam: Gieve Patel, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi and Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Mumbai 2024-25; News from Home, Galerie Derouillon, Paris, 2024; 200cm from
Your Shadow, Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2023; Shadow Speak, Bureau, New York, 2023; In Between the Notes, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2023; Every Bone a Song, Experimenter, Mumbai, 2022; Civitella Ranieri Chapel Show, Umbria, 2022; Can You Hear Me? curated by Phalguni Guliani, Vermont Studio Center, Vermont, 2022. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Whitewall, Art India Magazine and the Telegraph India, among others. Dodiya was awarded a residency and fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Italy, in 2022; was an artist-in-residence at Rondo in Mexico City in 2024; and has been awarded the Pioneer Works Visual Arts Residency in the Fall of 2025. The artist lives and works in Mumbai, India. Born in Mumbai in 1940, GIEVE PATEL is a renowned playwright, poet, artist and a practicing physician. He completed his medical degree from Grant Medical College, Mumbai, and embarked on his writing career with the publication of Poems, launched by Nissim Ezekiel in 1966. That same year Patel also held his first exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai. Patel’s work has most recently been exhibited at the Barbican Centre, London in a group show titled The Imaginary Institution of India, curated by Shanay Jhaveri, in 2024. Some of his major Born in Mumbai in 1993, BIRAAJ DODIYA is a visual artist based in Mumbai, India. She received her MFA from New York University in 2018, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Recent exhibitions include A Show of Hands | In Memoriam: Gieve Patel, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi and Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Mumbai 2024-25; News from Home, Galerie Derouillon, Paris, 2024; 200cm from
Your Shadow, Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2023; Shadow Speak, Bureau, New York, 2023; In Between the Notes, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2023; Every Bone a Song, Experimenter, Mumbai, 2022; Civitella Ranieri Chapel Show, Umbria, 2022; Can You Hear Me? curated by Phalguni Guliani, Vermont Studio Center, Vermont, 2022. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Whitewall, Art India Magazine and the Telegraph India, among others. Dodiya was awarded a residency and fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Italy, in 2022; was an artist-in-residence at Rondo in Mexico City in 2024; and has been awarded the Pioneer Works Visual Arts Residency in the Fall of 2025. The artist lives and works in Mumbai, India.
Born in Mumbai in 1940, GIEVE PATEL is a renowned playwright, poet, artist and a practicing physician. He completed his medical degree from Grant Medical College, Mumbai, and embarked on his writing career with the publication of Poems, launched by Nissim Ezekiel in 1966. That same year Patel also held his first exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai. Patel’s work has most recently been exhibited at the Barbican Centre, London in a group show titled The Imaginary Institution of India, curated by Shanay Jhaveri, in 2024. Some of his major exhibitions include Footboard Rider, a solo exhibition at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai (2017); No Parsi is an Island, a group exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, (2016); Gateway Bombay, a group show curated by Susan S. Bean with Beth Citron at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (2007); The Startling View from the Studio – Recent Paintings by Gieve Patel and Sudhir Patwardhan, Bose Pacia, New York (2006); and a solo show of paintings at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2004), among others. He was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1984 and the Rockefeller Fellowship in 1992. He was the C.R. Parekh writer-in-residence, Norman Foundation Grant, at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. The artist passed away in Pune in 2023.
Due to an Obscure Reason
BIRAAJ DODIYA & GIEVE PATEL
Curated by Linsey Young
FRIEZE No.9 Cork Street London W1S3LL
On view until 8 June 2025