BORN IN PUNE (Maharashtra, India) in 1949, Sudhir Patwardhan qualified as a medical doctor in 1972. He worked as a radiologist in Thane (Bombay) between 1975 and 2005. Then, he moved from medicine to become a full-time artist. Until the 19^th of October 2024, there is an exhibition of his paintings at number 3 Cork Street in London’s Mayfair.

The exhibition is called “Cities: built, broken”. As its name suggests, the show is filled with Patwardhan’s paintings, each of which depicts scenes of urban life. His beautifully executed, colourful paintings evoke daily life in Thane and Bombay (Mumbai). As the gallery’s website (www.frieze.com/no9-cork-street/vahdera-art-gallery-sudhir-patwardhan) explained:

“As a man of medicine, Patwardhan displays a profound understanding of the human figure, including its mental distortions and physical vagaries, with early inspiration from Cézanne and Picasso refining his intent. In this recent body of work, Patwardhan’s well-regarded visceral realism explores various dialectics and asymmetries, including class struggles, tensions between the material and spiritual and the emotional theatre of community. The shifting deportment of his figures across a series of charged slice-of-life scenes offers a moving portrait of the bustling annals of cities, where capitalist consumption, gentrification and the erosion of natural spaces are but few of the contested arguments about what constitutes as urban progress. He brings us a visual meditation on the geometric correspondences between various kinds of structures growing out of anarchic infrastructural development – often referred to colloquially in India as jugaad, or a kind of organized chaos.”

I could not have put this better. It describes the subject matter of the paintings beautifully. However, rather than just reading about it, I suggest that you see these wonderful paintings before the exhibition ends.