‘Family Fiction’ narrated by Sudhir Patwardhan

Sakshi Gallery presents a solo ‘Family Fiction’ by the veteran artist at Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA), Rabindra Bhawan, Delhi. It features about 40 paintings and drawings.

He reveals, “Stories about people remain the main focus but their source has changed. The current series is a (sort of) turning away from the earlier overtly social concerns like street violence and killings. Many of the new works are interiors and also images of people at home – situations quite familiar to all of us. But they also explore impulses one would like to keep hidden below the surface.”

On the eve of this much awaited show, Geetha Mehra, the director of Sakshi Gallery, has been quoted as saying, “This new body of works marks a turn for Sudhir Patwardhan whose engagement in the last three decades or so has been with the common people. The artist shifts his focus to family and relationships with his new series. An array of captivating paintings explore family life and feelings.”

For example, ‘Family’ includes figures held together by crosscurrents of expectations and disappointments. The older couple in the painting, moving off-center, face-up to a discomforting feeling of redundancy, as the younger one starts build their own universe around a new center…Brush drawings like ‘Turning a Deaf Ear’ are about the different ups & downs faced in this journey.

The husband-wife relation often encounters sexual impulses, making it a testing ground on which the relation is played out. It can result in violence or patient understanding. Illness and deaths remain integral aspects of any family story. A few drawings in the series view the sick bed as a site of waiting, anticipation.

Having painted the street of Mumbai at eye level for so many years, this new found pre-occupation on part of the artist with home space, does give rise to a few questions like: “Has the street life lost its relevance or attraction? Has it perhaps become that much more difficult to endure? But as he himself sums up, “The current retraction indoors is in all probability is a phase that will pass.”