For the culminative iteration of Cities: Built, Broken, curator R. Siva Kumar adds 50 Years of Picturing Life in the City to the title which further encompasses Patwardhan’s career-wide preoccupation with the urbane and the demographic it shelters. He further writes for the exhibition, "Sudhir Patwardhan is an artist of city life – not of any city in the abstract, but of Mumbai in its concreteness – exploring life, his own and those of others who live around him. His relationship to both is that of a reflexive thinker and an active interlocutor, not of a passive chronicler. His life and that of the city and its people impact and shape each other. Because of this mutual shaping, periodically, his focus shifts from one to the other. This back and forth, like a pendulum, pushes his art forward…The swing between the self and the social, home and the city is probably rooted in his early interests in Marx and Sartre. However, he never allowed ideological or intellectual dispositions to crystallize into habits and override or obscure experience. Empathy and objectivity, engagement and interrogation have always gone hand in hand in his thinking and art, and defined his ethics as a person and an artist.”
