With her kohl-rimmed eyes and curly grey locks, artist Rekha Rodwittiya cuts a striking figure, quite similar to her paintings and mixed media works. In her career spanning four decades, the 58-year-old has developed a politically vigilant feminist practice, wherein she showcases the female form in a multitude of settings and pays tribute to its indomitable spirit. Her protagonists are often set against the backdrop of domestic, quotidian settings and portray strength and wisdom. She continues this practice in her latest exhibition Love done right can change the world , which features acrylic, oil on canvas works, and digital prints.
The Vadodara-based artist constructs nuanced narratives around her subjects, transforming their mundane activities and the objects around them into tropes alluding to wider meanings. So what might seem as a woman holding a goat by its horns alludes to the Latin phrase carpe diem (seize the day). A figure with a kettle in one hand and a sword in the other denotes how a woman balances the dual roles of domesticity and worldliness with ease. One can’t help but notice how her protagonists appear to be larger-than-life figures who negotiate conflict, and assert their empowerment boldly.
Rodwittiya says, “We are increasingly looking at a world that is torn apart by a divisiveness fed by informed agendas. There is a danger when violence is produced by acts of ignorance, but it’s even worse when there is a kind of breakdown of all that you considered to be portions of harmony within civilisation. These parameters make these works prominent.”
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Rodwittiya has consistently explored themes of identity, self-representation and body and gender. “It’s a position that I have taken of engaging with and examining life and the reality of the human existence through the prism of feminist inquiries. I continuously work within the territory of gender politics. So, the female figure becomes the protagonist within the narrative.”
As for including domestic objects in her artworks, she says, “The world of everyday living includes things of daily necessities. Life is about how you find yourself in the realities that either you decide for yourself or deliver to yourself. Moreover, all artists construct for themselves something that is an equivalent of a lexicon. There are motifs and gestures, emblems and forms that come to make up a kind of dictionary through which they can formulate their articulation. The objects in my works come from spaces that are mine, or where I can think I can locate my belonging. The choice allows me to make visual sentences not only because of their inherent meaning, but also because of the significance I can impose upon them when I relocate them.”
Born in Bengaluru, the artist studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, and at the Royal College of Art, London. She held her first solo show in Vadodara in 1982. She has held solo exhibitions in New Delhi, Mumbai, Singapore, New York, London, Venice and Stockholm. Her works have also focused on marginalised sections of society. “My natural intellectual inclination is towards all those whose liberties are violated even subtly. What I have done is to hold a magnifying glass to that area that will encompass all those who are less competent. I am somebody who challenges stereotypes without fear. That way, I’m very public in my representation of my ideas.”
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The author is a freelance writer
Love Done Right can Change the Worldis on till January 7 at Sakshi Gallery, Colaba.