Sudhir Patwardhan (b. 1949, Pune, Maharashtra) is one of India's most significant contemporary painters, renowned for his empathetic portrayals of working-class life and the changing urban landscape of Bombay. Trained as a doctor at the Armed Forces Medical College, he moved to Bombay in 1973 and balanced a career as a practising radiologist from 1975 to 2005 alongside his artistic practice. This dual engagement with medicine and art shaped his deeply observant approach to painting, rooted in close attention to the rhythms and realities of everyday life.
Patwardhan has consistently described himself as a painter of people. His works foreground workers, commuters, and ordinary citizens, reflecting the social and psychological complexities of an expanding metropolis. Rather than simply documenting the city, his paintings evoke the relationship between its emotional and material conditions, capturing what critic Soumitra Das describes as the “viciousness and toxicity of urban life” alongside its profound melancholy and resilience. His reflective process and sustained engagement with lived experience are also explored in the documentary Saacha (2001) by Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar.
Patwardhan's work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, and has also featured in major exhibitions of contemporary Indian art internationally. In 2019, Nancy Adjania curated his retrospective, Walking Through Soul City, at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, offering a comprehensive view of his practice. A committed advocate for making art accessible, he also curated the exhibition Expanding Horizons, which brought contemporary Indian art to audiences across Maharashtra. His paintings are held in leading public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Modern Art.