India

Sudhir Patwardhan was born in 1949 in Pune. He graduated in medicine from the Armed Forces Medical College and worked as a Radiologist in Thane from 1975 to 2005.  He began to paint seriously since his medical college days. His first one person show was held in 1979. Since then his work has been seen regularly in exhibitions in India and abroad. 

Recent exhibitions and participations include - 'Line by Line' an exhibition of Patwardhan's gallery 88, Kolkata; Kochi-Muzris Biennale 2014; 'Seven Decades of Indian Drawing' at IGNCA, New Delhi; Modernist Art from India, Rubin Museum, New York. 2012; ‘Social Fabric’ at INIVA, London; and IFA -Galerie Stuttgart, Germany,2013; A one person show ‘Route Maps’ at The Guild and Jehangir Art Gallery in 2012;

The textile mill areas of central Bombay were an important source of imagery for me in the seventies. In a broader sense, they were the context of my images of workers. In the past few years I have felt a need to return to this source. The towering compound walls of mills, the chimneys, the stone bridges over railway lines, the teeming life around the suburban stations – all this continues to excite me as an artist. However, the closing down of many of these mills since the eighties, leaving thousands of workers jobless, has cast a gloom over the area. The high-rise apartment blocks sprouting on mill lands in recent years symbolize emergent forces displacing the old order. 

As the painting progressed, a triangular relation developed between the mill, the skyscraper and the bridge. The mill represented the past and the skyscraper the present.  Between these dying and emerging faces of reality, the bridge was the public space in which one saw people live through this transition. As I observed these people moving around the bridge, I sensed the flow of everyday life as a continuum across historical breaks, across change. It was like saying to myself : the pain of change will be borne, the price will be paid, and life will go on.