Running Woman

Sudhir Patwardhan's early paintings emerge out of his sense of complete identification with the working class. 'His figures exemplify the kind of energy needed to survive an increasingly atomised and fragmented existence. They are the 'insulted and injured', an uprooted urban factory proletariat that can be seen all around us: on construction sites, suburban trains, railway platforms, in slums and tenements. Patwardhan's attitude towards them is niether weakly emotional nor in any way idealised and this is evident in the shear massiveness of the figures, in the substantialness, which is the very measure of their will to endure; a will which would eventually manifest itself in political struggle. In other words they suggest the potential that exists to change the 'unchanging human condition'.' (India: Myth and Reality: aspects of modern Indian art, Oxford, 1982, p.57.)

Patwardhan's use of expressionist language reinforces the immediacy of Running Woman making her appear monumental and tender, in the most human way.