Sudhir Patwardhan has been one of the foremost voices of contemporary art in India. And his subject is his beloved city, Bombay, now Mumbai.
One can call him a chronicler of the city, not just the buildings, architecture or the changing times that bring progressiveness to the centre of it. But of its inhabitants and their relation with each other, the artist himself and with the structures within the city.
The radiologist turned full-time artist trains his compassionate gaze on the city dwellers, the workers, labourers and the ever-changing and growing crowd.
In the Durbar Art Gallery, his latest exhibition 'Cities: Built, Broken', curated by art historian and curator R Sivakumar, one can witness the changing perspective of the artist along with a growing city, its changing culture and politics.
"In his earlier works from the ’70s, you can see the influence of Marx, in how he was interested in the city. He is witnessing and he is speaking for the people, the workers. That changes as you gradually travel to the later years, where he questions himself whether he is allowed to speak for them," says Sivakumar. And in the upstairs hall of the gallery, a portrait of Marx, small in size, large in presence, looks on to the rest of the works.
Though his expressionist style and the figures that inhabit his canvas need no introduction, the internal dilemma of the artist is also visible in his later works, which are mainly displayed downstairs. His anger, too, is prominent along with confusion.
"The human connection, interaction gradually decreased in the '90s, the era of liberalisation. The city changes, the mills give way to the malls, the structures grow tall, loom over the people. And the people themselves change as the nature of work also changes," Sivakumar points out.
Soon, destruction is everywhere. Be it ‘Remains, Under a Clear Blue Sky’, where a Muslim man looks into his bulldozed home; the acrylic painting Lynching; or Built and Broken, where three figures in Nazi-era concentration camp prisoner attires look into the dead bodies in the ditch amid looming structures -- one genocide to the other.
He is also concerned about fellow artists who are dying and disappearing in war-torn areas. The brilliant work titled War Zone Studio depicts artists inhabiting a studio, whose edges and dimensions are never straightforward, where a bomb has fallen right in the middle. That vortex of the blast site is where the gaze falls, and on the right corner, you can see an artist amid creation.
Fifty years of Sudhir picturing a city, its inhabitants, even the monkeys, faceless figures, railway stations, the rising metros, the slums... Cities: Built and Broken is all that. And it is also a conversation with the artist himself, navigating the new political theories and landscape in an ever-changing modern world.
The exhibition, inaugurated on Tuesday, will conclude on September 28.