For art lovers in Kolkata, there’s a lesser-known place to explore — and it’s not just another gallery. Located on Hazra Road, TRI Art and Culture has opened its doors in a residential building nearing its 85th year, now transformed into a multidisciplinary haven for community engagement. With its distinctive triangular architecture inspiring its name and vision, TRI is committed to bringing together artists and reinforcing the idea that art is not a luxury, but a necessity.
The gallery’s latest exhibition, Cities: Built, Broken, focusses on the works of contemporary Indian painter Sudhir Patwardhan.
Born in Pune and trained in medicine, Patwardhan’s dual life as a radiologist and an artist adds a compelling layer to his creative practice. From 1975 to 2005, while working at a Thane clinic, he interpreted X-rays by day and cities by night, developing a visual language attuned to both anatomical and social fractures.
Patwardhan’s medical gaze — clinical yet compassionate — extends through this exhibition, with urban landscapes rendered like open-body scans, revealing the ailments of progress, displacement, and survival.
While Patwardhan’s large-scale paintings offer wide-angle views of urban disarray, his smaller drawings cut closer to the bone. These works address more intimate, sometimes brutal truths — emotional isolation, alienation and collective despair.
The 40+ artworks on display trace not just streets and buildings, but emotional infrastructure — the invisible load of urban living.
In Patwardhan’s hands, the city becomes an organism — one simultaneously growing and decaying. His paintings teem with building sites, traffic snarls, half-formed towers, displaced people, and fragments of daily life caught between movement and inertia. Yet, amid all this chaos, there’s something steady — the human figure shouldering obligations, anxieties and emotional disintegration.
Figures in his works are often small, anonymous, yet deeply expressive — pausing on a pavement, sipping tea inside a cafe, caught mid-stride in a blur of exhaustion. These are not heroic portraits. They are quiet observations of lives lived in the shadow of rising concrete and falling expectations.
Opened in 2024, TRI retains the character of the home it once was. Its textured walls and triangular geometry offer a spatial metaphor for the exhibition’s central concern — what are we building, and at what cost?
In a city already celebrated for its cultural legacy, TRI Art and Culture arrives as an invitation to experience art not just visually, but architecturally, spatially, emotionally.
Cities: Built, Broken may be about Mumbai, but housed in a building that bears Kolkata’s history in its bones, the show resonates across geographies. In line with its belief that art is for everyone, TRI offers free entry.
The gallery’s eighth exhibition since 2024, Cities: Built, Broken is on view till June 15 — don’t miss it.
