Important Notice

After graduating in medicine from the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, in 1972, Sudhir Patwardhan moved to Bombay where he took up art alongside his career as a radiologist. His work centres around the city’s working class and often documents the ever-evolving urban landscape that they inhabit. The present lot was painted in 1988, the year the artist began painting a series of plein air landscapes in the Pokharan area of Thane, close... After graduating in medicine from the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, in 1972, Sudhir Patwardhan moved to Bombay where he took up art alongside his career as a radiologist. His work centres around the city’s working class and often documents the ever-evolving urban landscape that they inhabit. The present lot was painted in 1988, the year the artist began painting a series of plein air landscapes in the Pokharan area of Thane, close to where he lived. Through these paintings, he sought a closer connection with the local community by offering interpretations of familiar scenes. The artist remarks, “[This painting] was done at a time when I was doing landscapes in the Pokharan area of Thane, inspired by Cézanne. These two-Boy (1988) and this work (also called Calf), were a study in the figure-ground relationship. The pattern on the left side (like one finds on a charpai bed) stands for the kind of interweaving of figure and ground that is aimed at in the painting.” (Artist in correspondence, May 2025)

He began to tighten the focus of his compositions, experiment with planar recession, and incorporate patterns into his work. Writer and critic Ranjit Hoskote explains, “...he became more conscious of the possibilities of representing deeply recessed pictorial space as surface. He was fascinated by the twinned relationship between figure and ground as positive and negative space, made of the same material but endowed with significance by their opposition, by the implied movement separating them yet holding them together. He studied Piero della Francesca’s method of juxtaposing a large head in the foreground with a small receding landscape that is physically next to it, but fictively miles away; Cézanne was another important point of reference, for Patwardhan’s project of rendering landscape in terms of low-relief visual relationships. In paintings such as ‘Calf’ and ‘Boy’ (both oils, 1988), Patwardhan savoured the surprise of laying two adjacent areas of colour on the canvas: one for the skin of the eponymous subject, the other indicating a river- bank or hillock several hundred feet away.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Complicit Observer Reflections on the Art of Sudhir Patwardhan”, The Complicit Observer, Mumbai: Sakshi Gallery, 2004, pp. 22-23)

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