Important Notice

Sudhir Patwardhan’s works, particularly his recent canvases, carry forward the simultaneously intimate and complex relationship that he has shared with his city, Mumbai, for several decades now. Today, Mumbai and its suburban sister, Thane, where the self-taught artist and radiologist resides, form one of the largest, most congested, and certainly most contradictory conurbations in the world. As fellow Mumbai artist, Jitish Kallat, explains, it... Sudhir Patwardhan’s works, particularly his recent canvases, carry forward the simultaneously intimate and complex relationship that he has shared with his city, Mumbai, for several decades now. Today, Mumbai and its suburban sister, Thane, where the self-taught artist and radiologist resides, form one of the largest, most congested, and certainly most contradictory conurbations in the world. As fellow Mumbai artist, Jitish Kallat, explains, it is “…at once dynamic and dysfunctional…a heady hodgepodge of languages, castes, religions and class difference. Life in the gargantuan metropolis goes on, precariously balancing commerce and corruption, affluence and abject poverty, swelling real estate prices and rampant homelessness" (Citing the City, Sakshi Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2007-08, p. 6).

In the present lot, titled Death on the Street, Patwardhan sensitively portrays some of the contradictory characteristics of the ever expanding city, focusing on a single event that has led to a rare moment of pause in the daily hurly-burly of urban life. Here, in an unfortunately typical scene, a crowd looks over a fallen figure, a victim of the metropolis’ intense vehicular traffic. Half sympathetic, half indifferent, the onlookers, including a traffic policeman, stop only for an instant before returning to their own business. As Kallat notes, in this painting, “…the picture holds emotions of concern and detachment in equal measure. Deaths on the streets of Mumbai, or Thane, have the potential of being treated as commonplace simply because of the frequency of such occurrences” (Ibid.).

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