Sudhir Patwardhan, Small Hill (2004)

Sudhir Patwardhan is a prominent Indian contemporary painter known for his powerful figurative works depicting the everyday lives of urban and working-class people and the landscape of India. Trained as a radiologist, Patwardhan practised medicine for many years at a municipal hospital in Thane while simultaneously building his career as an artist-an experience that deeply informed the empathy and social insight in his art.

“In my own way, I have done my best to use art to tell the stories of social struggle and the problems of being human and more importantly, to take art back to the public.” 

Patwardhan emerged in the late 1970s as part of a group of Indian painters who embraced a form of social realism, focusing on cityscapes, labourers, commuters, and the rapidly changing social fabric of Mumbai. His paintings often blend documentary observation with expressive, humanistic storytelling, capturing both the struggles and dignity of ordinary people.

 

Over the decades, he has exhibited widely in India and internationally. Major works were recently exhibited in the Barbican Centre's 2024 exhibition The Imaginary Institution of India, Art 1975-1998. The guidebook for this exhibition was fantastic and held a huge amount of information. You can access it HERE.

 

Several of his most significant works are held in major public and private collections, including KNMA, India and the Peabody Essex Museum in the USA. Patwardhan has also written about art and curated exhibitions, contributing to conversations on contemporary Indian visual culture.

Hills often feature in his paintings; islands of calm rising from the chaos of urban life in India. devoid of figures, they can be glimpsed through gaps in train carriages and loom large over his town and cityscapes.

His work has recently been exhibited across India as part of a touring exhibition organised by Vadehra Art Gallery, and can also be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

 

This work was originally exhibited at Sakhshi Gallery in Mumbai as part of the 2004 exhibition Recent works by Sudhir Patwardhan, and has been part of a private Swiss collection for the last 20 years.