born 1949 · Pune, Maharashtra
Sudhir Patwardhan
A radiologist who painted Bombay and its people alongside his medical work for twenty-five years. He was one of six artists in the 1981 show Place for People, which put the city and its people at the centre of painting.
Sudhir Patwardhan was born in Pune in 1949 and trained as a doctor, graduating from the Armed Forces Medical College in 1972. He moved to Bombay the next year. From 1975 to 2000 he worked as a radiologist, and painted alongside it.
His subject has been the city he moved to and the people who keep it running, especially the struggling middle class and the poor. The figures are solid and specific. The city behind them is never picturesque.
In 1981 he showed in Place for People, at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay and Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi, with Jogen Chowdhury, Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malani, Gulammohammed Sheikh and Vivan Sundaram. The critic Geeta Kapur wrote the catalogue essay. The show made a case for painting the people and places the painters knew, and is still read as a turning point toward figurative, narrative painting in India.
Through the 1980s his work went abroad with the Festival of India, to London, New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He became a full-time painter after 2005. In 2019 the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai gave him a large survey, Walking Through Soul City.
Notable works
- Place for People (group exhibition)1981Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, and Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi
- Gadyaparva (exhibition)1990Gallery Chemould, Mumbai
- Walking Through Soul City (exhibition)2019