Mumbai-based visual artist Biraaj Dodiya rhythmically traverses through drawing, sculpture, and painting in a soulful layering of disparate materials and revelatory human expression. The visionary’s formal education includes an MFA from New York University, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, paired with a thoroughly intuitive creative process and a keen sense of life’s nuanced poetics.
Her recent participation in the group exhibition “A Show of Hands | In Memoriam: Gieve Patel” unfolded at New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery (November 21, 2024–January 4, 2025), and Dodiya paid deep homage to the beloved artist through tones, textures, and tales of healing. Last fall in Paris, the exploratory creative sparked vibrant conversation alongside Polish artist Cezary Poniatowski in the presentation “News from Home,” which took place at the distinguished Galerie Derouillon (September 3–October 5, 2024). There, honoring filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s influential endeavor of the same name, Dodiya unearthed paintings energized by the fragile collisions of our public and private lives. Whitewall spoke with Dodiya to talk about tentative moments of familiarity and abstraction while working in her studio, the interchangeability of body and landscape, and new works rooted in ancestral tribute and remembrance.
Biraaj Dodiya Explores the Idea of Healing
Biraaj Dodiya, installation image: Siren’s Daughter and Fugue for Yesterday, 2023, courtesy of the artist.
WHITEWALL: Your work was recently on view in the group show “A Show of Hands | In Memoriam: Gieve Patel” at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi. It honors the late visionary’s multi-faceted exploration of the human condition. How were you energized by Patel’s soulful creative language with the Sleep Chorus series of works?
BIRAAJ DODIYA: I consider myself very lucky to have known and spent time with Gieve Patel. In the series “Sleep Chorus,” the primary form makes reference to ancient headrests (Egyptian, Japanese, Ethiopian, and others), and the pedestals are inspired by medical stretchers—motifs I have worked with in the past.
I was thinking about Gieve’s life as a doctor, poet, and painter—the tactile quality in nurturing patients and painting; the earthy palette of his paintings, and the faded, worn surface of rexine pillows in doctors’ clinics in Mumbai suburbs, where all kinds of heads find respite. I was thinking about the idea of healing, which is very much part of a doctor’s being, and Gieve Patel’s sense of openness to people and their lives, in his writing and his painting.
WW: What kind of critical dialogues within the Indian art community and the global art landscape might this exhibition spark?
BD: This exhibition felt significant because it highlights Gieve’s impact on multiple generations of artists. What he had was a rare generosity and an attentive engagement toward fellow artists.
I recently read Olivia Laing describing this quality in artists as “hospitality—a capacity to enlarge and open,” and I think Gieve did that for a community of artists and students in India. The works in the exhibition pay homage to his life as an artist and conceptually carry a certain poetry, sensitivity, and humane quality that was at the core of his life’s work.
“News from Home” in Paris at Galerie Derouillon
Biraaj Dodiya, “Suspended vanishings,” oil on linen, 78 x 60 inches, 2024, courtesy of the artist.
Biraaj Dodiya, “Carrying glass” oil on linen, 78 x 60 inches, 2024, courtesy of the artist.
WW: In the fall of 2024, your work was united with that of Polish artist Cezary Poniatowski in “News from Home” at Galerie Derouillon in Paris, which draws its title from Chantal Akerman’s formative film. What was your first impression of the filmmaker’s intimate work and how did it influence the paintings you presented?
BD: I first saw Akerman’s News from Home in 2019, soon after I returned home to Mumbai after graduate school in New York. I connected deeply with her poetic exploration of intimacy and distance in the overlaps of our urban and private worlds. The paintings for the exhibition in Paris trod over the idea of land, air, and home.
On the brink of losing form, focus, and familiarity, faceted surfaces generate new landscapes form fractured topographies. Despite working in an abstract language, I find myself often returning to the essence of Akerman’s cinema—the silences and the ache in recognizing the world around us.
WW: In this show, compelling paintings such as “Carrying Glass” (2024) and “Suspended Vanishings” (2024) draw in viewers with dark, perceptive intensity. At what point do these evocative titles reveal themselves to you?
BD: As I work on the paintings, multiple applications and erasures of paint slowly arrive at a certain density or gravity, and each suspended layer begins to hold purposeful significance, leading toward a final code. I’m interested in the moment when the painting starts asking—is it erosion or bruise, shoulder or cliff, entries or exits, soil or flesh?
This tentative moment of familiarity and abstraction often leads me to titles or reference points from poetry or literature.
Biraaj Dodiya in the Studio in Mumbai
Photo by Rid Burman, courtesy of the artist.
Biraaj Dodiya, “Tightrope,” oil paint on wood and linen, overall dimensions – 85 × 35 ¼ × 4 inches, 2024, courtesy of the artist.
WW: What is a typical day like in your Mumbai-based studio?
BD: These days I’m usually in the studio between 10:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m., but often I enjoy working late into the night. The initial stages of a project involve drawing, reading, writing, and experimenting with material. My studio is often both horizontally and vertically active as I like working on the paintings and sculptures simultaneously. I collect materials that may or may not go into the work, make drawings for possible sculptures, and take a lot of iPhone images in the street, in museums, or of natural forms. I usually work on more than one painting at a time, and they slowly transform; I am very interested in the chronology of the paint’s application—and cancellation—becoming undecipherable.
WW: How have you honed and balanced your creative process to become proficient in painting and sculpture?
BD: In recent years, my practice has expanded into sculpture and installation, but painting remains a central part of my process. I find myself most interested in working within the overlaps of these two media. The interchangeability of body and landscape has become the defining feature of my current practice, and to explore this through the tactility of paint and the versatility of sculptural material feels significant.
“The interchangeability of body and landscape has become the defining feature of my current practice,”
—Biraaj Dodiya
Biraaj Dodiya, installation image: “Sleep chorus I-VIII, 2024,” courtesy of the artist.
WW: What are some of the highlights for you in each discipline, elements that are very much in tune with your natural artistic abilities?
BD: In creating a body of work, scale, and atmosphere feel very important to me. I find that the larger paintings capture and envelop the viewer’s body within a “painted psychological landscape,” where vibrations of tectonic movement seem to resonate and engulf; the feeling of earth, form, and absence emerge slowly. Whereas, in the more intimate, “torso-sized” paintings, the emotive physicality of oil paint edits the soft darkness. I enjoy this play.
Through my sculptural work, I am able to bring in found objects (personal or off the street), references from art history (beloved images and objects of the past), and elements from the natural or architectural world (like beams, rocks, planks). These connections and translations feel crucial to a poetic choreography of material and mark.
WW: Are there any challenges or consistent surprises in either painting or sculpture that you continue to reckon with?
BD: Working in sculpture has brought certain physical demands into my creative approach—to build an object soundly, working with the appropriate materials, and the research and references that anchor an object. Once I begin painting on the sculpture, it brings a new set of visual surprises.
In the paintings, a relentless construction, deconstruction, and improvisation of material leads to the final form. The paintings develop much like an excavation site with extended processes of layering and digging. Ultimately, the work becomes a record of its own upended language.
Courtesy of the artist.
Biraaj Dodiya, “Sleep chorus II,” oil paint and polyester body filler on galvanized steel with caster wheels, 14 x 10 x 6 inches, 2024, courtesy of the artist.
WW: What are you looking forward to working on or seeing come to fruition in 2025?
BD: I’ve just started working on an installation inspired by the “ofrenda” form, which I became familiar with during a recent residency in Mexico City. Of course, the offering altar is common in many cultures, and I’m interested in the way in which small and big objects connect to form an installation rooted in ancestral tribute and remembrance.
“To observe the world and find a form in it, to be moved by all the art that has existed before me, and to make things with my hands,”
—Biraaj Dodiya
WW: What is your favorite aspect of being an artist?
BD: To observe the world and find a form in it, to be moved by all the art that has existed before me, and to make things with my hands.
Biraaj Dodiya, “Route unveiled,” oil paint on wood and linen, overall dimensions – 85 × 22 × 4 ¼ inches, courtesy of the artist.
Biraaj Dodiya, Marrow’s end, oil paint on wood and linen, overall dimensions – 85 × 31 ½ × 7 inches, 2023, courtesy of the artist.
