4 - 19 October
Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by leading Indian contemporary artist Sudhir Patwardhan – the artist’s first solo show in London. The show titled Cities: Built, Broken features a curation of recent work, including large and small canvases and a suite of drawings. The artist will simultaneously have a substantial body of work on view at the Barbican Centre, London, in a group show curated by its director, Shanay Jhaveri.
Sudhir Patwardhan’s oeuvre seeks to illuminate the moving obscurities and shared resonances of the human condition, molded by and manifesting in a variety of discursive worlds: from the cityscapes of Thane and Mumbai in India, and the unexpected hamlets of foliage that sometimes punctuate urban development, to the atmospheres of constructed spaces that seem to reveal the interiority of the people who inhabit them. Patwardhan’s tremendous empathy for his surroundings inclines him to tell the veiled yet supple stories of his protagonists – a subaltern, rising middle class rooted to the locales they occupy through varying intensities of emotion.
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. Moreover, by prioritizing the psychology of his subjects within their contextual parameters his compositions impress upon us landscapes, both real and symbolic, shaped by human tactility and dominance.