Rekha Rodwittiya's current show reaffirms her concerns with feminist issues.
Is 50 an epochal enough age for an artist? One when you can weigh your concerns sufficiently to be able to isolate them and view them as perhaps others might? Even perhaps to study them under the magnifying glass of labels — in this case as that of an artist as a feminist?
“I am happy to reaffirm that identity,” says Rekha Rodwittiya, whose show, rekha@50 at Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai, till November 18, continues her commitment to what she sees as a conscious structure in her art. “I have no sense of apology about the label,” she says, pointing out that “specifically in India” issues such as “lack of equalness” continue to foster female infanticide, dowry deaths and the continued practice of patriarchy. “Just because it doesn’t happen to me,” she explains, “doesn’t mean I should be voiceless.”
The exhibition was something her family wanted, and Rodwittiya was not averse to it. “I wanted it to be a celebratory point in my life,” says the artist who has made her positioned stand on the need to dispel the bigoted stereotype of gender bias a prominent part of her art. “I have lived my life on my own terms, with its ups and downs,” she explains, “and I’ve done it with delight. My work reflects the spirit of those concerns, and this exhibition is a celebration of my commitments to those areas.”
The Bangalore-born, Baroda-resident has established a niche for herself since the eighties, when her paintings on the subordination of women began to provoke debate and discussion. Ever since, her work has consisted of the one central female form that holds the viewers gaze even as it engages in what must be mundane tasks — of household work, sometimes occupied in settings of exquisite beauty, though Rodwittiya seems to prefer flat backgrounds so that the context is allowed to dominate. There is clearly a growing monumentality in her work, so at least one canvas is nine-feet wide.
“Besides the actual scale,” points out Rodwittiya, “it is the conscious keeping out of things, of brevity as a discipline, that helps to translate the context.” “The single figure is like a paradigm,” she explains, “within which you have to push and pull and re-arrange what you are hoping to communicate, something,” she hesitates, “like the work of a Zen master.” Or, I remind her, like a body of Jain art, minimal, but no less powerful for that.
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We’re speaking over the phone, and Rodwittiya’s voice, far from being intimidating (as you’d imagine one that belongs to a “feminist” artist) is warm and comforting. Yet, you cannot help but point out that her nudes, far from appearing vulnerable (which, in all fairness, they never did) now seem almost dominating. Are they, perhaps, also more aggressive? “If you have any intimacy with my works,” says Rodwittiya — it is her way of pointing out that if you are familiar with her paintings — “the words you might wish to use are ‘assertion’, or ‘empowerment’. The term ‘aggressive’ is synonymous with violence, which is something I find upsetting.”
At 50, how does she keep cheerful, given her concerns? For Rodwittiya, it is important that art such as hers should have “the power to provoke, to instigate discourse, to keep alive a certain consciousness” even though it means that “it is tedious sometimes to again and again become the voice of others”. Which is why she prefers “the participation of collective faces” in dialogue, especially when it concerns itself with either aspects or the impact of violence on art. Or, as she points out, “without the romance of belief, of positive optimism, one would succumb to a sense of despair, of desperation”.
That’s something neither Rodwittiya, nor her women (even shorn of the modesty of their clothes) would never do. No wonder rekha@50 is a celebration rather than just a milestone in the chronicles of an artist.
