Arts Preview: Meet prominent Indian artist Atul Dodiya

Atul Dodiya decided to become a painter when he was just 10 years old. But despite learning mostly about European art history for his bachelor of fine arts degree in Mumbai, in which he graduated some 11 years later, the Indian artist had never seen any of the actual masterworks - apart from their reproduced images - until he went to Paris just before he turned 30.

"I was someone who had starved for a long time, and when you put food [in front of him] he would just grab it," says Dodiya, now 54 and one of India's most prominent artists. "Due to that, there was so much involvement and interest in someone else's art that I would not forget it when I did my own. As soon as I see sunflowers I'll think of Van Gogh. When I see a bowl of goldfish I'll think of Matisse. Anything would remind me of someone."

You could say Dodiya is taking art history literacy to the next level. In a decades-spanning career that has seen him appropriate the works of everyone from Jasper Johns to Philip Guston and Van Gogh to Picasso, he has established a hybrid brand that skilfully merges his imageries with those of other masters.

At his solo show at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein's Self-Portrait and Lucio Fontana's iconic slit on canvas are but two of the references scattered across Dodiya's set of new works. To highlight the wide range of medium and technique of his oeuvre, the exhibit includes three of his rolling-shutter paintings and a series of delicate watercolour-on-paper pieces, inspired as much by art history as they are the artist's own fantastical musings.