Since the 1970s, Sudhir Patwardhan has expressively chronicled Mumbai’s evolving urban landscape with remarkable empathy and insight. Born in 1949 in Pune and trained as a radiologist at the Armed Forces Medical College, Patwardhan is, improbably, one of India’s most uncompromising chroniclers of urban life. His early works focused on construction workers, day labourers, railway porters, commuters, street vendors, and rickshaw drivers, capturing the lives of the urban working class with expressive urgency. Today, he is recognised as one of India’s first Postmodern artists, known for his sprawling cityscapes and portrayals of the working class in Mumbai and Pune.
A self-taught artist with a working-class ethos and Marxist ethics, Patwardhan has long positioned himself outside the circuits of glamour and spectacle that increasingly define the Indian contemporary art scene. He practised medicine in Thane for thirty years, and in parallel, painted with surgical focus and precision. His protagonists are not the elite, not the mythic, but the often overlooked working class who build cities but are systematically excluded from how they are imagined.
Much of Patwardhan’s oeuvre is characterised by his deep empathy and social awareness, and focus on the struggles and resilience of ordinary people in bustling city environments. Often spatially and optically complex and Expressionistic despite his bent for representative Realism, his paintings depict changing urban environments, civic strife, and the human body engaged in physical labour — mirroring the lived experiences of working-class individuals in various quarters of the city, particularly the crudely-built slums and congested suburbs. Unlike many of his contemporaries who were swept up in Postmodern abstraction or nationalist iconography, Patwardhan remained committed to figurative realism, drawing inspiration from his enduring commitment to Marxism and the workers’ movements of the 1980s and the theater of life in the city.
In Patwardhan's paintings, the city is never a backdrop. It looms, it breathes, it fractures and binds. The sharp, straight-edges of the architecture and the built environment share equal weight with the soft, fragile shapes of human bodies. People lean, bend, stretch, and fade into the structures, but never quite disappear — they represent participants in a system, not metaphors in a mythical narrative. Patwardhan’s realism is not sentimental. He doesn’t romanticise the working class or flatten them into one-dimensional perfect victims.
It is this moral and ideological clarity — this refusal to aestheticise urban poverty or hide behind conceptual fog — that sets Patwardhan apart. In 'Cities: Built, Broken' at Tri Art & Culture, Kolkata, Patwardhan presents a new body of paintings and drawings which serve as his form of “involvement with the city” while examining the supportive-while-imposing nature of urban infrastructure. A contemporary contemplation on urbanity of the 21st century in Mumbai and beyond as bulldozers and bombs reduce homes and entire neighbourhoods to rubble, the exhibition features 40 new works by Patwardhan with select drawings and print renderings of older paintings from 1977 to 2012. Here, Patwardhan presents the question: What is truly being built and what is irrevocably being broken?
'Cities: Bulit, Broken' is on view at Tri Art & Culture, Kolkata, till June 15, 2025.
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