Witness to a Changing City: Sudhir Patwardhan’s 'Cities: Built, Broken'

At once painter and chronicler, Sudhir Patwardhan has, for over four decades, documented the rise and rupture of Mumbai’s ever-expanding cityscape. His latest solo exhibition, Cities: Built, Broken, presented by TRI Art & Culture, courtesy of Vadehra Art Gallery, in Kolkata (17 April – 15 June 2025), marks a return to themes that have preoccupied the artist since the 1970s. What distinguishes this new body of work is its urgency — a visceral response to a city, and indeed a world, under mounting pressure from unchecked development, political violence, and ecological collapse.

“This body of work actually took shape after the pandemic,” Patwardhan explains. “The work during the pandemic was mostly interiors. I was restless to get into the city and start working with images of the city as soon as the pandemic eased.” Cities: Built, Broken is thus not just a continuation, but a resurgence — the artist’s renewed reckoning with the urban environment in its latest, most volatile form.

Patwardhan’s paintings have long offered a visual sociology of the metropolis, especially Mumbai and Thane, where he worked for decades as a radiologist. That dual role — medical doctor by day, painter by night — sharpened his perspective. While he resists drawing a direct link between medicine and art (“Not really,” he says, when asked if he sees a continuity), he acknowledges that “the interaction with patients daily did give me a perspective on the life of ordinary people.”

In Cities: Built, Broken, that diagnostic impulse intensifies into a lament — for a ground that is no longer stable, and a city that seems to rise on ruins. “It is as if a new city is replacing the old city that we know,” he observes. “The change is so rapid and extensive that it feels like we are losing all that we loved about the old city… what this change is likely to destroy is the sense of community and of a shared life, and of a history.”

As Madeleine St. John, Director of TRI Art & Culture, notes, Patwardhan’s work performs a kind of “urban radiogram.” In paintings like Under a Clear Blue Sky (2024), the artist confronts state violence and the precariousness of life on the margins. A lone figure stands before the remains of a demolished home — a stark reference to the bulldozer politics that have come to define certain acts of governance in contemporary India. “I would say I am stating the observed,” Patwardhan says. “I am not setting out to make a political statement, but that gets inevitably made.”

The central painting, Cities: Built, Broken (2024), is equally searing. Here, chaos radiates from the heart of the city: a vision of collapse surrounded by still-standing buildings that might fall at any moment. Unlike the vast panoramic canvases of his earlier years, these newer works convey a tighter, more claustrophobic atmosphere. “What I have tried to express is the experience of pedestrians and my own feelings as one navigates the city roads,” he notes. “The claustrophobic feeling is very much an aspect of people’s daily experience. The earlier belief in the liberating aspect of the modern city is probably vanishing.”

This shift is both formal and philosophical. Patwardhan’s recent paintings no longer dwell on the heroic labour of building; rather, they underscore the psychic and spatial costs of a city that grows without pause, often at the expense of its own people. He asks: What is truly being built, and what is being broken in the process? His canvases offer no easy answers, but plenty of difficult truths.

Reflecting on his changing perception of the city, Patwardhan says: “Initially in the 70s everything about the city excited me — the crowds, the massive structures, the movement. The textile strike was a kind of wake-up call to reality. Then the real estate boom and the riots of the early 90s showed up the ugly side.” Where he once walked the streets as a participant, he began to adopt a more distanced, panoramic gaze. “There was a period before the pandemic when I was thinking ‘I can’t paint the city anymore, the way it is going!’ But the isolation of the pandemic made me want to engage with the city again.”

Gayatri Sinha, in her essay titled Under a Clear Blue Sky, suggests that Patwardhan’s vision of Mumbai has “come full circle.” From early depictions of a city rising from mudflats and marshlands to his latest works that portray Kafkaesque ruins of concrete and steel, Patwardhan has remained a steadfast observer of the city’s transformation. Yet, what was once a tone of cautious optimism has shifted towards a more sombre, even cynical outlook. “The disillusion is more general,” Patwardhan adds. “It is not the life of the ordinary citizen that drives the development, but a host of other political and economic drives, including the profit motive.”

The choice of Kolkata as the site for this exhibition is especially poignant. TRI Art & Culture, housed in a heritage building repurposed for public engagement, becomes a contextual echo to the works on display. “It definitely did inform how I approached the show,” he says. “We decided to include some older works to give a better context to the current lot. The two-level space dictated some choices during installation. And most importantly, Kolkata too is a city looking to transform itself, so the works speak to that aspect.”

The exhibition also includes prints from earlier phases of the artist’s practice, anchoring the new works within a broader historical arc. This juxtaposition allows viewers to trace not just the evolution of the city, but also of Patwardhan’s own engagement with it — from an almost documentary mode to one that borders on allegory. The figures in his latest works are not merely citizens but symbols: of endurance, of loss, of fractured belonging. “The people in my work are the ones I see all around me,” he says. “I try not to manipulate them to tell the story I want. They just play their own part and tell their own stories.”

Thematically, Cities: Built, Broken is bound up with notions of ground and grounding — both literal and metaphorical. As Sinha notes, ground in landscape painting was once associated with the natural, the sacred, the bucolic. In Patwardhan’s paintings, however, ground becomes a contested site, obscured by tar and concrete, stripped of memory and meaning. It is no longer a place to return to, but one from which people are forcibly removed or subtly excluded. The artist thus repositions the city not as a static location but as a battleground of ideologies, where space is continually produced and politicised.

This tension is underscored by the painter’s recurring depiction of partial, obscured, or truncated figures. People do not appear as protagonists so much as participants in a larger, often hostile, urban machine. Commuters jostle for space, pedestrians are boxed in by roadworks, homes crumble or are swept away. These are not scenes of apocalypse, but of slow, grinding estrangement. The city is not collapsing; it is metastasising.

In many ways, Patwardhan’s work aligns with the theories of Henri Lefebvre, who argued that urban space is always socially produced — not merely a backdrop to life, but its very medium. Patwardhan’s cities are precisely this: spaces shaped by capital, violence, memory, and resistance. They are also moral landscapes, demanding that viewers consider their own complicity in the making and unmaking of urban life.

Yet despite the bleakness of his subject matter, there remains a sliver of hope in Patwardhan’s vision — hope grounded not in grand gestures, but in the artist’s persistent act of witnessing. “Soon after the pandemic, I felt the need to re-engage with the city and try and understand its new avatar,” he reflects. To paint the city, even in its brokenness, is to refuse its invisibility. To depict its marginalised inhabitants, even in states of dislocation, is to assert their presence. In this, Patwardhan remains what Ranjit Hoskote once called “the complicit observer”: involved, implicated, but never indifferent.

Cities: Built, Broken is not just a meditation on urban form — it is an ethical enquiry. It invites us to reflect on what it means to live in cities that are in a constant state of flux, and to question what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of progress. Through Patwardhan’s eyes, we are reminded that the city is not merely built of concrete and steel, but of bodies, histories, and dreams — all of which must be held in view, even as they risk being buried beneath the next layer of development.