Sudhir Patwardhan

Contemporary Paintings from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Charitable Trust, Part II, Sotheby's New York, 3 April 1996, lot 61

Bern, Kunstmuseum, Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, 20 September 2007 - 10 February 2008

Fibicher, B. and S. Gopinath, eds., Horn Please: Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art, Germany, 2007, p. 99 illus.

Good overall condition.
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Sudhir Patwardhan is a retired radiologist and self-taught artist who began to paint in the 1970s after he moved to Bombay from Pune. Observing the abandonment of the textile mills in the city and the influx of migrant workers into the suburbs where he lived, Patwardhan explored the alienation endured by devastated and displaced communities. His paintings are a representation of the landmark social and political changes that were rousing Bombay at the time.

Actively engaged in politics, with firm Marxist views, Patwardhan’s art is a reflection of his sympathies for the marginalised underclasses. Class differentiation, social mobility or lack thereof, poverty and urbanisation, are addressed throughout his corpus of works. Incorporating his own style of realism, Patwardhan represents his subjects and surroundings in an accessible manner, so that his work is not only portraying the masses, but is also painted for them. The labourer toiling in anonymity epitomised a theme that was central to his oeuvre. 'My aim is to make figures that can become self-images for the people who are the subjects of my work. One of the questions I have asked myself in this context is how close or distanced must I be from the figures I paint. Too close a relation may overburden the image with the artist's private impulses. These impulses give the image intensity, but at the same time they may also insulate the image from other approaches.' (Sudhir Patwardhan, Place for People, Bombay and New Delhi, 1981, unpaginated)

Patwardhan was an adherent of the Baroda School's development of Narrative Figuration. Patwardhan like his contemporaries, Bhupen Khakhar, Gieve Patel and Gulammohammed Sheikh chose to depict personal and contemporary histories within a format that shows multiple contemporaneous vignettes within the same image. Here in Keralite, Patwardhan illustrates a group of construction workers building a highway. The title implies that the workers originate from the South Indian state of Kerala. Since the beginning of the 1970s Kerala has been a major exporter of unskilled and skilled labour.

Painted at eye level, this work characterises the elements and people involved in constructing a road. Tyres, metal roofs, sheets of wood, a billboard and a wristwatch, all represent aspects of time, material and labour required to complete this process. The painted blue roof is typical of the makeshift materials that populate the poorer slums, where plastic tarpaulins are prevalent. The composition at eye level draws the viewer into the scene allowing one to sympathise with the subject. As Girish Shahane notes in his essay on page 10, the placement of the alluring mermaid billboard above the toiling labourers represents an unattainable promise of sexual fulfillment hanging above their heads.

‘Patwardhan has continued to paint “peopled landscapes” that document and respond to changes in Bombay and Thane […], he has also investigated interiority and relationships at close range. Turning inward, provoked perhaps by the riots and sectarian violence that besieged Bombay in the early 1990s, Patwardhan in much of his work from this time reflected on middle-class domestic life and even private questions of the self. […] The work, and Patwardhan’s subsequent dual engagements with figuration and landscape, is evidence of his commitment to the articulation of “people” and the environment, and his constant questioning of the artist’s role and intervention in the surrounding urban environment.’ (Susan Bean, Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India after Independence, London, 2013, p. 212).