“The champas in Anju Dodiya’s Ghatkopar studio haven’t flowered this year. The lush garden that once perfumed the air now stands bare, its silence broken by the sounds of honking and construction from the lane outside, a lane that once only held a school and a Jain monastery. Inside, the terrazzo floor has begun to crack; the fissures seem almost deliberate, echoing the ruptures that have come to define our time — social, political, ecological, and deeply personal.
It is in this uneasy quiet that Anju’s new body of work takes shape. These paintings do not seek refuge in beauty, even though beauty hovers insistently at their edges. Their surfaces, stretched like rooms divided by invisible seams, are exacting in their rigour. Each section of canvas, layered, collaged, pieced together, holds its own world yet bleeds into the next.
A solitary hand points toward a group of mourners that remind us of Gaza. Lovers twist into branches. The body contorts, caught between longing and violence. Every mark on paper and cloth is haunted by something both intimate and immense.
Collage was where Anju began, slicing through Time and Newsweek magazines when such gestures were not considered art at JJ. She discovered watercolour almost by accident, though she admits to still yearning for oil. There is a single oil painting in the show, an act of self-mockery, she says: 'See, I still can’t do the medium justice.' But that unease is her strength, the refusal to settle or smooth over tension.
Her world is one of punishing precision. Fabrics collected obsessively from small shops across the world become the skin of her paintings. A wax print from West Africa brings a burst of colour to an otherwise muted scene; a British Museum tea towel, stained and stretched, becomes the canvas for another. There is an obsession here with formal beauty — with line, composition, texture — but not with producing a conventionally beautiful object. The work’s seduction lies in its structure, in its ability to draw you in and then disquiet you.
The figures we’ve known in Anju’s past work — readers, sleepers, solitary dreamers — return here changed. They no longer recline on mattresses but stand on taut canvases. Their bodies are angular, alert, defiant. The pencil, once a tool of imagination, now oscillates between instrument and weapon. Anju jokes that the show is “sponsored by Staedtler,” but the laughter is edged with danger. The pencil becomes a symbol of both creation and coercion: something that gives voice, but also something that can be shoved down throats to force one into silence.
If solitude defined her earlier work, this show marks the emergence of a crowd. Anju returns to Renaissance compositions, to Magdalene and mourning women, not in search of religion but to study collectivity and ask what it means for women to be seen together. Hotel-room isolation, once a source of quiet introspection, gives way to painted collages made on found books. Folded papers painted black open into small abysses, portals into something vast and unknowable.
And then there are the logs.
They sit at the heart of this show: her log women. Inspired by Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s cult meditation on small-town dread, Anju reimagines that surreal figure — the woman who carries her log as though it were both burden and companion. In Lynch’s world, the log is a vessel for secrets, for listening. In Anju’s, it becomes a relic of what we have lost: the trees cut down, the histories felled. Yet it also holds a strange stability, a companion in crisis, a burden that grounds.
For Anju, trees are not just forms or motifs but ancient ancestors - constant, vertical witnesses to history. They appear in every visual document of collective memory: the crowds perched on branches in Bresson’s photograph of Gandhi’s funeral; the boys peering down from trees in Giotto’s frescoes of the Passion; jubilant men waving from treetops when the Second World War ended. Trees have always watched us, held us, borne witness to our transformations and our follies. In this show, they return as both evidence and elegy.
Daphne, that ancient figure of flight and transformation, shadows these works. For years, Anju has returned to her: the woman who fled and became a tree. What once seemed a lyrical escape now feels more violent, more complex. In earlier works, Daphne’s metamorphosis was brutal, her body pierced by branches. Later, she softened into her fate, a parable of domestic stillness. But here, Daphne reappears — mischievous, rebellious, perhaps finally free. She swings from trees, reads, writes, plays. Yet the spectre of capture lingers. How long does freedom last before it calcifies into myth?
That question hums beneath the surface of every painting. When the champas refuse to bloom, when political slogans echo through school loudspeakers, when the city outside collapses into noise — can Anju, can any of us, still find happiness? Her work suggests that perhaps we can, if only fleetingly. That joy and dread are no longer opposites but two sides of the same trembling surface.
There is anger here, yes, but also a strange serenity. Anju speaks of stillness not as passivity, but as resistance. In an age of urgency, of constant outrage and digital noise, her paintings compel us to pause. They demand attention, not consumption. They refuse polemic, yet they are political in the deepest sense — offering space for reflection when space itself feels endangered.
This, perhaps, is Anju Dodiya’s most radical gesture: to hold a quiet room in a world that will not stop shouting.”
Text Anish Gawande
Date 3-11-2025