Art Sudhir Patwardhan reflects on human condition, anxiety, and confinement in his recent set of works
As a practicing radiolog till 2005, art Sudhir Patwardhan witnessed several medical emergencies but nothing that could have prepared one for the pandemic. “I have been cut off from medicine for over 15 years now and no longer have that everyday experience of confronting patients but the intensity and scope of this situation is definitely much more than what we had experienced in our lifetime,” says the Mumbai-based art.
Like most others, he too was going through a whirlwind of emotions — from being confined home during the intermittent lockdowns to watching closely as the COVID numbers swinged, and durbed when thousands of migrants walked to their homes. In his studio, his thoughts translated onto canvas as he painted the “personal experiences of being a working art during the last year, overshadowed world events and the pandemic“.
Assault (2021)
He presents before the audience a frustrated protagon living in isolation and battling varied fears in the exhibition Portraits of an Exential Art at Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi, till February 23. “The works are instigated the current situation but also move in other directions and are metaphoric. The images suggest ambiguous meanings. One might experience a sense of confinement in various ways, in a situation, within your class, privilege, personality, thinking and so on,” says Patwardhan, 72. He adds, “Art has always been a way of moving out of such confinement. It connects you with the world but there are times when you also begin to question whether it is a kind of escape or a solution to anything; such questions never leave you. This body of work has come in a phase when I am trying to make sense of what it means to feel like this,” says Patwardhan.
When the first lockdown was announced in March 2020, the self-taught art had just concluded his retrospective titled “Walking Through Soul City” at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, that documented, among others, his ponderings on Mumbai and its inhabitants. Last year, in an online exhibition presented Mumbai’s The Guild and Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery, he shared works painted during the pandemic, from canvases that celebrated mundane everyday tasks to migrants walking home. “During the early stages of the pandemic, it was durbing to see the hardships of workers walking back to their villages and towns. With time one got used to not going out, but gradually the confinement and the helplessness started seeping in,” says Patwardhan.
Tear (2021).
Known to explore urban exence and the precarious relationship between human beings and their surroundings, in the ongoing exhibition — showing at the gallery as well as online — Patwardhan responds to the more immediate past. The suite of works range from Tear that has an art ripping apart a self-portrait, to Assault, that has him stare at a portrait under his foot. In Slash it’s men up in arms against the other.
The art also turns to the past to ponder over the present. If in War-II (After Abid Padshahnama) he refers to the texts from the Mughal era, in War-I (After Piero Della Francesca Legend of the True Cross) he turns to the early Renaissance frescoes, and has a man stabbing a soldier on his acrylic. “Unlike science, art does not move horically from one to the other. Renaissance art Piero Della painted someone stabbing. The Mughal miniatures recorded gruesome killings. You are witness to similar things today, and the question is where do you place your response to all of this. When you are painting a riot or a killing, one wonders if it is a pure record or a response or a danced view. Art is affiliated to life in various ways and there are no answers.”
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