Track the journey of the two artists and you track the story of how a graphic language rooted in Indianness is enriching the global art lexicon. While galleries across the world lap up works of senior artists like Tyeb Mehta, Jogen Chowdhury and F.N. Souza, Dodiya and Gupta stand out as mid-career artists breaking new ground — both in terms of the big money their works fetch and the distinctive referencing of their roots. One of Gupta’s most striking works, Very Hungry God — a one-tonne skull crafted out of aluminum pots, pans, and other kitchen equipment, with a gaping mouth that demands to be fed — was snapped up recently by François Pino of Christie’s. Commissioned for the Nuit Blanche, an all-night arts festival held annually in Paris, it was installed for only 24 hours in a beautiful neo-Gothic church of Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle in the Goutte d’Or.district.

Collectors in the West, say art critics, tend to ask an annoying, but crucial question: what is Indian about an artist? “Both Subodh and Atul are painters who are culturally rooted, and it seems to be the opportune time for them to emerge as important figures,” points out Shireen Gandhy of Gallery Chemould. International art critic Peter Nagy, currently based in Delhi, for example, points out that Gupta’s work exploits, in new and innovative ways, the clichés through which India is seen. Both are also chroniclers of an India in the throes of globalisation — the energy of its bustling economy and the disquiet of migration and change are mirrored in their work.

Gupta is indeed a magician of the mundane. He works with a wide range of media — from sculpture and painting to installation and photography. His distinctive feature has been in taking objects from everyday life and elevating them to artwork; to him also goes the credit of fashioning art out of kitchenware. In his recent solo exhibition at the Bodhi Art Gallery, he placed an assortment of tiffin-carriers on a sushi conveyer belt — inspired by Japanese kaiten-zushi, a restaurant where plates are placed on a rotating belt. Consumption, consumerism, globalisation and mobility — the work brings together various threads of Gupta’s oeuvre. “Here I’m talking about globalisation: the migration of culture through food. The work is titled Fait Matters,” says Gupta.

The 43-year-old’s fascination with utensils began when he was a boy. “I have always helped my sister and mother in the kitchen and I realised what a big role the vessels we cooked in play in the perception we have of our lives,” says Gupta.

A sense of a country convulsed by change always comes through his work. You often come across liminal spaces in his work — loaded airport trolleys, railway stations and taxis — which speak of people on the move. Sample: Across Seven Seas, a room-sized airport conveyor belt cast in aluminium, topped with 30 metal suitcases and bundles, which was sold for £550,000 to a German collector at the Basel art fair.

Unlike Atul Dodiya, who got noticed because Indian galleries have been showing his work at various fairs around the world, Gupta’s international buyer base is larger. “Subodh has very strong international connections and representatives, with galleries like the New York-based Pierre Huber Gallery promoting his work. The sale of Very Hungry God has led to a dramatic rise in his non-Indian collector base,” says Dinesh Vazirani of Saffron Art.

Gupta hit it big when his installation at the 2006 Saffron Art auction netted Rs 60 lakh. Recently, he broke his own record at Christie’s in a post-war contemporary sale, where his installation went for Rs 2.5 crore. The work was sourced from gallery Art & Public in Geneva that showcased a collection of his creations at the Frieze Art Fair in 2005. “In this auction, they did not show his work in a separate Asian section. Subodh was the only Indian artist there. It goes to show that he has made the crossover from an Asian artist to an international one,” says Vazirani.

In the Edge of Desire, an exhibition of contemporary art organised in association with the Asia Society and Art Gallery of Western Australia, curator Chaitanya Sambrani showcased three works by Gupta under the sub-head, Transient Self. One was a passport-sized painting dabbed with cow dung, with the word ‘Bihari’ emblazoned in neon at the bottom. The second was a photograph of the nude artist seated on a leather sofa; the third ‘self-portrait’ was the aluminium-plated bicycles that milkmen use. “Subodh presents the viewer with local and global identities through his twin self-portraits. It’s a tongue-in-cheek comment reverberating with humour and irony,” comments Sambrani. The work mulls on the nostalgia for the lifestyle of traditional India and interrogates the artist’s culture and self.

But even as Gupta teases out the cracks between a traditional way of life and the pressures of globalization, his work has universal appeal. Gupta’s earlier works, says Geeta Mehra of Sakshi Art Gallery, were ‘loaded’ with information from Bihar or his personal life. “But he has been able to do away with the narrative and bring in an abstraction which is universal. This is why his works have a wide appeal. They are local but equally global. You don’t need a cultural subtext to read his works but they are specific to his locale and country.”

Nagy commends Gupta for forcing us to take a fresh look at the stereotypes of India. “Subodh locks onto these clichés and examines them from a number of angles: the sacred cow and its dung, medicines and religious rituals; stainless steel kitchen articles and country-made firearms; an over-stuffed kitsch-baroque armchair or a scooter slung with milk pails; the image of the Indian worker in transit encumbered with commodities.”

Atul Dodiya is also an artist rooted in his environs. Demure, usually dressed in khakis and blacks, the 47-year-old refuses to move out of Ghatkopar, where he lived in a chawl for years (he has overhauled his tiny studio instead). He has none of the eccentricities of an artist and could easily pass off as a doctor or an accountant. “When I chose to become a painter, my friends were quite worried about how I was going to make a living. They never saw painting as a career. But my family never opposed it,” recalls Dodiya. “My father, a civil servant, bought me a first-class train pass so I could go and see all the art shows. My sister wanted me to become an architect. But I was weak in mathematics,” says Dodiya with a wry smile. Luckily for Indian art, he flunked math and joined the JJ School of Art in 1982. Today he is the youngest painter in the history of Indian contemporary art to have got over Rs 1 crore for his work at an auction house.

From a predominantly realist approach, Dodiya has gone on to incorporate a rich hybridity in his work — one that arises from a deep engagement with the country’s popular culture, from cinema to calendar art, from comic strips to international masters like Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp. International recognition has not been hard to come by. In 1999, he won the Sotheby’s Prize for Contemporary Art. Another high was when his works were shown at the Tate Museum, London, in 2000, as part of the exhibition ‘Centuries Cities: Art And Culture in Modern Metropolis’.

His big international debut came in 2000 at the Japan Foundation Asia Center in Tokyo. In the exhibition, Bombay: labyrinth/laboratory, Dodiya used shopfront shutters —doorways to an urban, commercial life — to create a series of three-dimensional works that constantly conflates the dark, sometimes chilling, world of Mumbai’s streets with iconic symbols of Indian life. For example, a shutter painted with a kitschy image of the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, opens into a stark interior — a grainy newspaper picture of three women who killed themselves because they could not afford a dowry. The Japan Foundation Asia Centre writes: “The rolling-shutter paintings of 2000 mark his change of mode to using everyday objects that can be found in the public space of a city, such as a collapsing gate, ladder, cart and movie billboard.”

But it is Dodiya’s increasing use of the language of kitsch that has made critics call him the next Bhupen Khakhar. His most recent ode to Khakhar, that opened at the new Chemould on Prescott Road, was, says Gandhy, who referenced the exhibition, a “personal tribute” and “an in-house dialogue”. The show’s most endearing images were garish fibreglass busts of the painter. Khakhar’s possessions like his pillow, his favourite books and his dentures were placed alongside kitschy objects — that were part of his aesthetic language. “In many ways, he has come in to replace Bhupen as a master of kitsch and pop,” says Gandhy.

What does the future hold for these two artists? Dinesh Vazirani of Saffron Art says it all depends on where and how they position themselves. “Atul has had a series of solos at Bodhi, Vadera, Chemould and Art Gallery, now it’s time for him to establish his non-Indian representation with more international fares and shows. With Subodh it’s important to see what kind of work he does next and what relationships they forge with his audience.” Whatever be the road ahead, the artists of the quotidian are sure to take Indian art to greater heights.