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Sudhir Patwardhan’s canvasses essay complex compositions of the city he has inhabited from the 1970s. He subtly brings together elements that seem to be otherwise ‘apart’ to weave it into a narrative, a colourful one yet speaking of hard realities of rapidly changing cityscapes and the disassociations in everyday lives that are created. While Patwardhan's fascination for geometric shapes fashioned by the rows of buildings and houses lingers on, his people continue to be busy and engaged with all their spirits up, braving the new world!

As we await our next exhibition (October) at our Alibaug gallery, recalling a body of work by Rakhi Peswani that beautifully transformed the space her objects once populated. The Primal Reminders: (A Precarious Balance) – a carefully constructed hanging sculpture of seemingly ‘found’ objects like a gunny sack, a bundle of sticks, twisted cloth; structures made of a log of wood, wiry aluminium wires and wool. As Prof. Parul Dave-Mukherjee put it in her essay: “Her artistic labour empties them of their original use value, pulls them out of an agricultural context and the very change of orientation from their place on the ground to that of vertical suspension imbues them with new poetics of form.”

‘Obsolete Objects’ (working title) two recent bronze sculptures by artist T. V. Santhosh,
brings into prominence the accelerating technological changes that are changing our social
and everyday experiences.  

These two sculptures of Santhosh are currently part of ‘Sculpsit’ exhibition at The Guild,
Alibaug, curated by Sasha Altaf. On until May 25, 2019.

“…Technology is fast progressing in a way, upgrading the existing systems, and in some
cases even replacing the old one with a completely new system. In the process, the world is
becoming more and more like a wasteland of obsolete electronic items. Today, we live in a world
of use and throw culture. Nostalgia does not necessarily deal anymore with childhood experiences
as of relation with electronic objects, in this super-industrial society. My generation lived through
a period of transition, from the era of the radio to the iPod, revolutionizing our approach towards
listening to music. Although, all these electronic gadgets have become obsolete and most of them
are no longer in use or in their earlier form now.

These two sculptures are a kind of re-imagined documentation of obsolete objects that have become
part of our nostalgia today. Objects that remind us of a bygone era, memories that talk about many
cultural and social changes that took place as these objects came into our social and personal life
and how eventually they ended up becoming mere residual imprints of their time. And they also talk
about how successive paradigm shift happened in the area of technological advancement, along with
its side effects, which is pushing us to redefine the idea of progress from a larger ecological
perspective.”  - short excerpt from full concept note.

Terracotta works of Sudhir Patwardhan

‘Sculpsit’ an exhibition that opened at The Guild, Alibaug on 12 April 2019 curated by Sasha Altaf, includes four pieces of terracotta sculpture and one bronze by artist Sudhir  Patwardhan. These four pieces of terracotta were made when Patwardhan was into making the Pokharan series of landscapes during 1987/1988. During the process of visiting the site a number of times, and further exploring the landscape, he wanted to try out how the distance and foreground could be explored in low relief. And so the idea of these low relief sculpture emerged. There was also an element of fragmentation of space by creating differing depths and also rendering the space like Cezanne might have done in his paintings and drawings.  While these low relief sculpture were made in clay at his studio, they were taken to Dharavi to have them fired as there was no in-house facility or nearby kilns to fire them.

In our current exhibition these terracotta are displayed mounted on board. Some of them have also been cast in bronze, one of which is exhibited in the ‘Sculpsit’ exhibition while the other bronzes were shown at his major exhibition ‘Hamsafar’  at  Roopankar Museum, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal in  2018 by The Guild in collaboration with Bharat  Bhavan, Bhopal.  A number of his landscape and head terracotta are documented in ‘The Complicit Observer’  brought out by Sakshi Gallery, Synergy Art Foundation Ltd., while the bronzes are published in the  ‘Hamsafar’ catalogue.

Sudhir Patwardhan’s works have been shown widely in India and overseas with significant institutional and museum participations.

He is an occasional writer and lecturer on art, and also a curator who has focused on introducing new audience to contemporary art. Recent one-person exhibitions include ‘Hamsafar’  in 2018,  at Roopankar Museum, Bharat Bhavan Bhopal, presented by The Guild in collaboration with Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal; ''Spectres' at Mumbai and Vadehra Art Gallery, 2017, Delhi;  ‘Route Maps’ in 2012 at The Guild, Mumbai; 'Family Fiction' in 2011, and 'Citing the City' in 2008 at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai. Participations in important group exhibitions include Kochi Muziris Biennale 2014-2015; 'Seven Decades of Indian Drawing' at IGNCA New Delhi; ‘Social Fabric’ at INIVA, London; and IFA -Galerie Stuttgart, Germany, 2013 and Modernist Art from India, Rubin Museum, New York. 2012.

Forthcoming: Retrospective at National Gallery of Modern Art Mumbai by The Guild in collaboration with National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai previewing in first week of December 2019

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