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Lot Essay
After an initial interest in landscape, I began to concentrate solely on the figure sometime in 1973. The first significant and fruitful convergence of my intellectual and pictorial preoccupations occurred in '75. I had been working with a kind of autobiographical and expressionist drawing when I became preoccupied with an image of the sitting man, the worker, encountered daily in the suburban train.
- Sudhir Patwardhan, 1979
Five Figures is an early landmark in the oeuvre of Sudhir Patwardhan, one of India’s leading postmodern figurative painters. Painted in 1976 during India’s state of Emergency (1975–77), a period of political unrest, censorship and repression in the country, this monumental work is among the artist’s most ambitious. It also represents a key turning point in Patwardhan’s career, encapsulating themes that would define his practice, including urban labor, fortitude and social struggle as expressed through the human figure. First exhibited in 1979 at Art Heritage, New Delhi, as part of Patwardhan’s debut solo show, this painting played a crucial role in establishing his reputation.
Born in Pune in 1949 and raised in a middle-class Maharashtrian household, Patwardhan trained as a radiologist at the Armed Forces Medical College. He moved to Bombay in 1972, where he worked full-time as a doctor for over thirty years. A self-taught artist, his medical background instilled a lifelong interest in an anatomical engagement with the human figure. The early works he painted in Bombay, including the present lot, are also shaped by the industrial landscape that surrounded him. By the mid-1970s, the working-class man or commuter had emerged as the main protagonist of his paintings, set against the backdrop of the urban or suburban environment.
Patwardhan described this shift in the catalogue for his 1979 solo exhibition where Five Figures was exhibited, noting, “The first significant and fruitful convergence of my intellectual and pictorial preoccupations occurred in '75. I had been working with a kind of autobiographical and expressionist drawing when I became preoccupied with an image of the sitting man, the worker, encountered daily in the suburban train. The need to relate to him was ideological and also more personal, arising from my experience of transition from an essentially provincial middle-class milieu to an industrial metropolis. As I faced him, the forces that appeared to batter and exhaust his life became imagined tensions experienced in terms of my own body. And through these I tried to distort his image, making use of the experience of my earlier drawings. His 'concrete presence' however resisted this distortion and acted as a counter and centripetal force. The image that took shape had a certain immobility, as if fixed between these conflicting forces” (Artist Statement, Sudhir Patwardhan, New Delhi, 1979, unpaginated).
Painted in 1976, Five Figures is one of the earliest, largest, and most significant examples of Patwardhan’s shift toward figuration. His paintings from this period typically focus on a solitary male figure – usually a laborer – alienated by the urban landscape he is portrayed in. As the artist explained, “My paintings of the period usually showed just one centrally placed figure, embodying a vision of a resolute working class” (Artist Statement, The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998, 2024, London, 2024, unpaginated). In the present lot, however, Patwardhan has chosen to portray multiple figures in this signature style from the period. They are all naked, pulled to the foreground and arranged in a relief-like, frieze formation. Their bodies are presented as bold, imposing masses, almost sculptural in form, oversized within the stage-like city background they inhabit.
The electricity pylon, cropped at the top of the canvas, is a key motif in Patwardhan’s work, symbolizing urbanization, labor and power – elements that would reappear in his work across the next decades of his career. The deep brown darkness that frames the figures, richly textured with impasto, emphasizes their isolation and endurance. The background is distinctly industrial, evoking the working-class experience of anonymity and alienation. Here, the city is not just a backdrop, but an omnipresent force, competing with the human figures for space. Like the city, each figure is stripped bare, neither idealized nor sentimentalized, but rather concrete and imposing, resisting both abstraction and naturalism.
On the right, three men stand behind a grey fence, their eyes shadowed with dark circles and their expressions seemingly conveying incredulous judgment of the man and woman on the opposite side. The visage of the woman on the left is delicate and forlorn, while her male companion’s features are largely obscured. She raises her hands high above her head, in surrender perhaps, following the monolithic black pylon that bisects the composition and separates the two groups. The man’s lone hand is also partially raised but is unlike any other limb Patwardhan paints in this composition, unmistakably referencing Tyeb Mehta’s iconic figures from his Diagonal Series of the 1970s. Mehta’s paintings were renowned for their exploration of existential suffering and violence, closely linked to the sociopolitical realities of India. Patwardhan’s allusion to Mehta, revered as a modern master, imbues this composition with gravitas, transforming his abstracted figure into a fully realized, tangible body embedded in the urban reality of Bombay.
Painted at the height of the Emergency, Five Figures also mirrors the severe political repression under Indira Gandhi’s government at the time. Civil liberties were suspended, censorship was widespread and urban workers in cities like Bombay faced forced evictions and aggressive state control. One of the most controversial policies of the Emergency was the government’s forced sterilization program, in which thousands of men were subjected to coercive sterilization campaigns as part of population control measures. Perhaps the stark nakedness of the figures in Five Figures alludes to these policies, stripping individuals of their autonomy and rendering them vulnerable and dehumanized. While Patwardhan’s work does not depict explicit acts of protest, these Five Figures certainly appear to be victims of oppression, caught in a conflict they are powerless to resist. As the artist’s noted, “The figure had a certain immobility, as if fixed between these conflicting forces (Artist statement, Sudhir Patwardhan, New Delhi, 1979, unpaginated).
Patwardhan’s work was recently featured in the landmark exhibition, The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998, held at the Barbican in London, including another significant painting from the same series titled Dhakka (1977). Where Five Figures captures a moment of silent endurance, Dhakka, or ‘push’, represents the next logical step – a more explicit moment of struggle, as a single figure is caught in the violent push of urban life.
Given its scale, historical significance and inclusion in Patwardhan’s first solo show in 1979, Five Figures is unquestionably one of the most important paintings by the artist to ever come to auction. In this seminal work, Patwardhan masterfully explores notions of labor, resilience and the human condition in the urban landscape in India before the onset of neoliberalization and globalization in the Subcontinent.
- Sudhir Patwardhan, 1979
Five Figures is an early landmark in the oeuvre of Sudhir Patwardhan, one of India’s leading postmodern figurative painters. Painted in 1976 during India’s state of Emergency (1975–77), a period of political unrest, censorship and repression in the country, this monumental work is among the artist’s most ambitious. It also represents a key turning point in Patwardhan’s career, encapsulating themes that would define his practice, including urban labor, fortitude and social struggle as expressed through the human figure. First exhibited in 1979 at Art Heritage, New Delhi, as part of Patwardhan’s debut solo show, this painting played a crucial role in establishing his reputation.
Born in Pune in 1949 and raised in a middle-class Maharashtrian household, Patwardhan trained as a radiologist at the Armed Forces Medical College. He moved to Bombay in 1972, where he worked full-time as a doctor for over thirty years. A self-taught artist, his medical background instilled a lifelong interest in an anatomical engagement with the human figure. The early works he painted in Bombay, including the present lot, are also shaped by the industrial landscape that surrounded him. By the mid-1970s, the working-class man or commuter had emerged as the main protagonist of his paintings, set against the backdrop of the urban or suburban environment.
Patwardhan described this shift in the catalogue for his 1979 solo exhibition where Five Figures was exhibited, noting, “The first significant and fruitful convergence of my intellectual and pictorial preoccupations occurred in '75. I had been working with a kind of autobiographical and expressionist drawing when I became preoccupied with an image of the sitting man, the worker, encountered daily in the suburban train. The need to relate to him was ideological and also more personal, arising from my experience of transition from an essentially provincial middle-class milieu to an industrial metropolis. As I faced him, the forces that appeared to batter and exhaust his life became imagined tensions experienced in terms of my own body. And through these I tried to distort his image, making use of the experience of my earlier drawings. His 'concrete presence' however resisted this distortion and acted as a counter and centripetal force. The image that took shape had a certain immobility, as if fixed between these conflicting forces” (Artist Statement, Sudhir Patwardhan, New Delhi, 1979, unpaginated).
Painted in 1976, Five Figures is one of the earliest, largest, and most significant examples of Patwardhan’s shift toward figuration. His paintings from this period typically focus on a solitary male figure – usually a laborer – alienated by the urban landscape he is portrayed in. As the artist explained, “My paintings of the period usually showed just one centrally placed figure, embodying a vision of a resolute working class” (Artist Statement, The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998, 2024, London, 2024, unpaginated). In the present lot, however, Patwardhan has chosen to portray multiple figures in this signature style from the period. They are all naked, pulled to the foreground and arranged in a relief-like, frieze formation. Their bodies are presented as bold, imposing masses, almost sculptural in form, oversized within the stage-like city background they inhabit.
The electricity pylon, cropped at the top of the canvas, is a key motif in Patwardhan’s work, symbolizing urbanization, labor and power – elements that would reappear in his work across the next decades of his career. The deep brown darkness that frames the figures, richly textured with impasto, emphasizes their isolation and endurance. The background is distinctly industrial, evoking the working-class experience of anonymity and alienation. Here, the city is not just a backdrop, but an omnipresent force, competing with the human figures for space. Like the city, each figure is stripped bare, neither idealized nor sentimentalized, but rather concrete and imposing, resisting both abstraction and naturalism.
On the right, three men stand behind a grey fence, their eyes shadowed with dark circles and their expressions seemingly conveying incredulous judgment of the man and woman on the opposite side. The visage of the woman on the left is delicate and forlorn, while her male companion’s features are largely obscured. She raises her hands high above her head, in surrender perhaps, following the monolithic black pylon that bisects the composition and separates the two groups. The man’s lone hand is also partially raised but is unlike any other limb Patwardhan paints in this composition, unmistakably referencing Tyeb Mehta’s iconic figures from his Diagonal Series of the 1970s. Mehta’s paintings were renowned for their exploration of existential suffering and violence, closely linked to the sociopolitical realities of India. Patwardhan’s allusion to Mehta, revered as a modern master, imbues this composition with gravitas, transforming his abstracted figure into a fully realized, tangible body embedded in the urban reality of Bombay.
Painted at the height of the Emergency, Five Figures also mirrors the severe political repression under Indira Gandhi’s government at the time. Civil liberties were suspended, censorship was widespread and urban workers in cities like Bombay faced forced evictions and aggressive state control. One of the most controversial policies of the Emergency was the government’s forced sterilization program, in which thousands of men were subjected to coercive sterilization campaigns as part of population control measures. Perhaps the stark nakedness of the figures in Five Figures alludes to these policies, stripping individuals of their autonomy and rendering them vulnerable and dehumanized. While Patwardhan’s work does not depict explicit acts of protest, these Five Figures certainly appear to be victims of oppression, caught in a conflict they are powerless to resist. As the artist’s noted, “The figure had a certain immobility, as if fixed between these conflicting forces (Artist statement, Sudhir Patwardhan, New Delhi, 1979, unpaginated).
Patwardhan’s work was recently featured in the landmark exhibition, The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998, held at the Barbican in London, including another significant painting from the same series titled Dhakka (1977). Where Five Figures captures a moment of silent endurance, Dhakka, or ‘push’, represents the next logical step – a more explicit moment of struggle, as a single figure is caught in the violent push of urban life.
Given its scale, historical significance and inclusion in Patwardhan’s first solo show in 1979, Five Figures is unquestionably one of the most important paintings by the artist to ever come to auction. In this seminal work, Patwardhan masterfully explores notions of labor, resilience and the human condition in the urban landscape in India before the onset of neoliberalization and globalization in the Subcontinent.