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Lot 35

 

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A practising radiologist and self-taught artist, Sudhir Patwardhan's works explore the shaping of his city through its inherited history as well as its immediate, current surroundings. Patwardhan's paintings manifest the "...figurative artist's ambivalent position as a voyeur-clairvoyant - one who watches other people's crises from the vantage-point of his image-making practice - they [Patwardhan and other figurative artists of his generation]... A practising radiologist and self-taught artist, Sudhir Patwardhan's works explore the shaping of his city through its inherited history as well as its immediate, current surroundings. Patwardhan's paintings manifest the "...figurative artist's ambivalent position as a voyeur-clairvoyant - one who watches other people's crises from the vantage-point of his image-making practice - they [Patwardhan and other figurative artists of his generation] have explored a productive tension between the solitude of the studio and the sociality of the public sphere" (Ranjit Hoskote, "The Startling View from the Studio: Recent Paintings by Gieve Patel and Sudhir Patwardhan", Gieve Patel Sudhir Patwardhan, Bose Pacia Modern exhibition catalogue, 2006, p. 5).

Preoccupied with the precise depiction of a single moment, and paying little attention to the suggestion of what precedes or succeeds it, Patwardhan's paintings elevate everyday happenings and unprivileged urban citizens to the status of the ceremonial. In the present lot, Patwardhan places his figures in an ambiguously structured room, into which crowds and scenes from the city loom through the windows and doors. Under the stark light of a fluorescent tube an old man, perhaps an autobiographical figure, stands across a workbench from a woman who seems to be consciously avoiding his gaze. Another woman, draped in a white sari, sits placidly in front of some shrubbery in the distance, further conflating interior and exterior.

Patwardhan explains, "There are periods when I am neither here nor there. It is in this in-between space that figures closest to my heart take shape. Figures neither far nor near...like the distance between me and the stranger in the street or the cafe. In such figures, close enough to be sensually full-bodied and disquieting, but distanced through the act of observation and depiction, are compounded the pleasures and the problems of both extremes. The character and social background of these figures are established, and they take on a sociological role - but it could well be an autobiographical one" (as quoted in Gieve Patel, "The Human Presence", Ibid., p. 65).

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