Anju Dodiya

Anju Dodiya was born in 1964 in Mumbai (then Bombay), India, and continues to live and work there. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai, in 1986. Her practice moved from early watercolor studies toward large, narrative works on paper and canvas, and later to three-dimensional installations built on mattresses and fabric, all organized around a recurring fictional self-portrait that stands in for broader questions of vulnerability, creativity, and violence.

She built her exhibition history through decades of solo shows at Gallery Chemould (later Chemould Prescott Road) in Mumbai beginning in 1991, and expanded internationally through Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi and Galerie Templon in Paris and Brussels. Her international profile rose with inclusion in the 53rd Venice Biennale's Making Worlds in 2009, curated by Daniel Birnbaum, and continued through the fourth Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2018 and Sharjah Biennial 15 in 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include Tower of Slowness at Galerie Templon in Brussels in 2021, Geometry of Ash at Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai running into late 2025, and Ancestral Log at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi in 2026. In 2025 she made her debut presentation at Frieze London through Vadehra Art Gallery.

Dodiya's critical reputation rests on the sustained, literary quality of her narrative self-portraiture and her movement from watercolor into charcoal, textile, and installation. Ocula, surveying her career, has described her exhibitions as unfolding "a textured, thoughtful story with an intuitively feminine orientation and an elegant simplicity." Her inclusion in the 53rd Venice Biennale, the fourth Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and Sharjah Biennial 15 has anchored her as a fixture of major international group presentations of Indian contemporary art, alongside a long solo track record at Chemould Prescott Road, Vadehra Art Gallery, and Galerie Templon.

Dodiya's market runs primarily through her galleries rather than the auction room. At Frieze London in 2025, Vadehra Art Gallery sold three of her paintings at USD 50,000 each, a primary-market benchmark for her current work. Her secondary auction market is thin and difficult to verify from public sources: a lot attributed to her appears in Saffronart's Summer Online sale of 15 to 16 June 2026, but the listing available does not disclose a confirmed hammer price, and aggregator sites such as MutualArt restrict complete sale histories to paid subscribers. No single all-time auction record, with a specific work, price, house, and date, could be independently confirmed as of this writing.

Dodiya's secondary market is thin and hard to verify from public sources. A recent Saffronart lot attributed to her exists but without a disclosed hammer price, and aggregator databases such as MutualArt do not make complete sale records public without a subscription, so no all-time auction record can currently be stated with confidence. Her stronger and more consistent price signal currently comes from the primary market through her representing galleries. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authentication for her work run through Vadehra Art Gallery, Galerie Templon, and Chemould Prescott Road, and collectors should treat any auction-high claim from a database summary with caution until the underlying lot is identified.