Publication Information
Sudhir Patwardhan is a painter of urban life. His images unfold the city he knows so well-Mumbai. His Mumbai is urbs, with its surrounding factories, industrial chimneys, tenements; its backbreaking toil, grime, sweat, pain, grit, accidents, crowds and stench. It is life at its rawest. Yet in his paintings its inhabitants retain their character, vitality and dignity. He is passionately concerned with this life and is not just its chronicler. He is its poet as well, who lets the spontaneous experience sink in, to recall it in the tranquility of his studio. His work has links with the great humanist tradition in painting from Brueghel to Leger, but he belongs to no school. Along with his large yet detailed paintings, of the crowded railway station or the busy bazaar street, Patwardhan also gives us an intimate personal view of life. We see images from his radiology practice. Observe then the woman sitting erect, looking straight at you from the canvas... or is she facing the X-ray machine, anxious and tentative? What will the prognosis be? She asks and we wonder. Mind you this doctor-painter's gaze is not invasive it is gently reassuring. His morning medical practice distills into the afternoon's studio painting. For years I have worked in the Lower Parel area, but it takes Sudhir's 'Lower Parel' painting to actually bring home to me the present pathos of the defunct textile mills and its workers. Specific spaces become powerful images and get juxtaposed to retain and reinforce the character of the location. They capture the bustle of the mill area and equally the silence of the devastated landscape laid barren with toxic chemicals and industrial waste as in his 'Ulhasnagar. This publication is not only about the three decades of Patwardhan's career but as much a tribute to the city of Mumbai, its people and its "confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out." Geetha Mehra Director Sakshi Gallery