Although his lifetime’s work can be seen as an unstoppable anthol­ogy of Mumbai’s hope, aspiration and struggle, he has also documented the most tumultuous mo­ments in the city’s recent history.

Spend a few hours in Patwardhan’s company and it becomes clear that he’s always been a painter of people more than places. Even though the landscape, architecture and street life of Mumbai has found vivid expression in his works over the decades, it is figuration and the human condition that remains the cornerstone of his art

His vast acrylic canvases may seem like a faithful depiction of the specific area, an ordinary and quite typical part of Mumbai with its uncomfortable symbiosis of decent residential buildings and poor ones, of industry and nature. These, however, exude a strangely bewitching atmosphere -both serene and disturbing, roughly literal and poetic in a... See more