Fall
Fall depicts a construction worker who has plunged from bamboo scaffolding. Behind the figure stands an incomplete building paneled with beautiful tiles, whose design the artist borrowed from a Mughal painting. Like many of Patwardhan’s paintings since the 1980s, Fall is suffused with a representational objectivity that reconstructs from memory a place he has observed in the city of Mumbai. The artist painted the scene during a time when large tracts of the city were being redeveloped, as the cloth mills that made Mumbai an industrial powerhouse were shutting down and scores of laborers were made redundant. Fall has a distinctly fragmentary narrative quality that heightens the isolation and loneliness of the industrial worker. To Patwardhan, the painting reflects "a kind of fall from grace" of the unprotected working class and the breakdown of the social fabric of the city against a seemingly attractive landscape of a growing industrial suburb.
Artwork Details
- Title: Fall
- Artist: Sudhir Patwardhan (Indian, born Pune 1949)
- Date: 1998
- Medium: Acrylic on canvas
- Dimensions: 60 × 42 in. (152.4 × 106.7 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Gift of Virginia and Ravi Akhoury, 2023
- Object Number: 2023.369.3
- Rights and Reproduction: © Sudhir Patwardhan
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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