Frieze Masters 2025 | Ancestral Log by Anju Dodiya

At Frieze Masters, in the Studio section curated by Sheena Wagstaff, we present a solo project titled 'Ancestral Log' by Anju Dodiya that features several large works and groups of smaller drawings, rendered in watercolour and mixed media on paper and fabric.

Anju Dodiya’s compositions render a psychology of brooding, working with powerful images that revel in the emotional theatre of an inner world. Her protagonists are most often female and so assembled from popular mythologies and autobiographical fictions, who even in their composure tend to swell with emotion, much of which is captured in a resonant state of anxiety or unrest. Dodiya’s images are weaved together from a striking arrangement of inspirations from Ukiyo-e prints and the Italian Primitives to intricate tapestries, high fashion and cinema, alongside a desire to acquaint such sources with perceptions of subverted beauty through a cultivated state of rapture. Her shaped mattresses and paintings often relate to the interior and intimate, where, as a technical nuance, the temperature of colour becomes both medium and messenger in conjuring a vortex of alternative expressions. In Ancestral Log, Dodiya considers the artists of the past as ancestors and the studio as an ongoing logbook, exploring the side stories – sometimes calm and often stormy – of domesticity, creativity and the restlessness of contemporary living.