Timeline

Her early years at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda laid the foundations of what now stands as a politically alert feminist practice of painting. She found herself at odds with the male chauvinism of her contemporaries in the Indian radical painters and sculptors Association, which did not allow for any gendered redefinition of art practice. This was if anything, a confirmation for her of her resolve to seek a way of painting that functioned with clearly articulated feminist political intentions.

Rekha Rodwittiya lives and works in Baroda.

Recent years have seen Rodwittiya exploring archetypal figuration of the female form in a celebratory mode. The disappearance of the male figure from her work is not so much a measure of exclusion as it is a positive assertion monumentalized figure of the female protagonist.

Rekha Rodwittiya was born in Bangalore in 1958. She studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda (B.A. fine 1981), and at the Royal College of Art, London (MA 1984, on the Inlaks Scholarship). Her work has been included in several group exhibitions in India and internationally, including the VI International Triennial, New Delhi (1986), India in Switzerland: Six Young Contemporaries, Geneva (1987), and Inside Out: Women Artists of India, touring exhibition in the UK (1995-96).

The representation of the female figure has been a paramount concern for her, even as it has been significant for several feminist artists. Rodwittiya has been consistently working with the problem of representing the female form in a way that does not allow voyeuristic participation from the onlooker.