On the way to meet artist Sudhir Patwardhan, you encounter all the familiar motifs associated with his art. From Mumbai's local trains and old neighbourhoods struggling to keep up with swanky Miami-style skyscrapers to average office goers pushing you out of their way at rush hour and shopkeepers, beggars, tea-drinkers, bystanders revelling in their extraordinary ordinariness. It's business as usual in this so-called cosmopolitan city and Sudhir Patwardhan, its undisputed Chronicler-in-Chief, is back with plenty of new tales to tell.
City on CanvaS
For the last four and a half-decades, Patwardhan has worked tirelessly towards transmuting Mumbai's everyday urban scenes onto his canvas. Viewers can now catch a glimpse of the 70-year-old artist's prodigious career in 'Walking Through Soul City', a full-throttle retrospective that opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai on November 30. As Shalini Sawhney of The Guild gallery puts it, "This exhibition is a must-see as it traces Sudhir's full arc, from fledgling years to what he is today and how his art has evolved."
