'In Another Mode' Spotlights Three Decades Of Sudhir Patwardhan’s Humanist Drawings

A self-taught artist shaped by a working-class ethos and Marxist politics, Sudhir Patwardhan has spent decades looking away from the glamour, spectacle and rarefied social worlds that have come to dominate the imagination of Indian contemporary art. Since the 1970s, his paintings have returned, with quiet insistence, to the streets, neighbourhoods and peripheral spaces of Mumbai, attending to the people who inhabit and make the city rather than those who merely claim it as their own.

Born in Pune in 1949 and trained as a radiologist at the Armed Forces Medical College, Patwardhan practised medicine in Thane for three decades while developing, in parallel, a formidable painting practice. Something revealing emerges in the unlikely convergence of these two disciplines: his canvases often possess the same forensic attentiveness as a medical examination, but are animated by an empathy that refuses to reduce its subjects to objects of observation. His protagonists are rarely the powerful or the mythologised. They are workers, commuters, migrants and ordinary residents — the people who build and sustain the modern Indian city, even as they remain largely invisible within its official images of itself. Patwardhan’s achievement lies not simply in depicting them, but in insisting that they occupy the centre of the picture.

‘In Another Mode: Sudhir Patwardhan’s Drawings 1970–2000’, curated by R. Siva Kumar, brings together more than 200 drawings spanning three decades of the artist’s early practice. Beginning with works from 1971, when Patwardhan was still studying medicine and training to become a radiologist, the exhibition offers an intimate view of a body of work that has remained central to his larger engagement with the human figure, urban life, and the social worlds that surround him.

Stripped of the scale and density of his paintings, Patwardhan’s drawings are more akin to fleeting encounters than larger-than-life tableaux of urban life. His spare, expressive lines give physical form to states of vulnerability, solitude, longing and connection. At the same time, the spaces around his figures remain equally suggestive — recognisable, imagined, and shaped by migration, labour, development, displacement, and the fragile relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit.

The exhibition also foregrounds the relationship between Patwardhan’s medical training and his artistic practice. His analytical attention to the human body gives his lines and forms a physical weight and vulnerability while remaining attuned to the emotions carried through it. In his drawings, human anatomy becomes a matter of lived experience: how a body occupies space, responds to another body, or reveals something words cannot.

‘In Another Mode: Sudhir Patwardhan’s Drawings 1970–2000’ is on view from 25 September to 23 October 2026 at Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53 Defence Colony, New Delhi. Learn more here.

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