Curatorial Structure and Wall Texts

Curatorial Structure and Wall Texts

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The Personal and the Political

We begin the exhibition with the portraits of the artist’s parents – ‘Aai’ (1972) and ‘Appa’ (1982) and ‘Marx’ (1973) and ‘Gandhi’ (1971). His political parents, especially Marx, gave him the freedom to craft his own destiny by forging alliances across classes. As a student of the Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC) in Pune, in the late 1960s, Patwardhan took hobby classes in painting at the Abhinav Kala Mandir. Alongside, he was introduced to Marxist thought by his activist friend Sandeep Pendse. An autodidact, but a rigorous one, Patwardhan gravitated towards the post-impressionist language of Cezanne. In ‘Mutha Ghat’, 1971, we experience the sheer delight with which he engages in mark making. From Cezanne, Patwardhan had intuitively grasped that painting is not the simple reportage of retinal reality but that it is a self-conscious act of representation. The pattern of light and shade in ‘Mutha Ghat’ transforms nature into architectural elements and architecture into an organic geometry.

The Impossible Object