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Lot 41

 

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Arpita Singh's paintings are informed by and address the multiple histories she has witnessed and narratives she has played a part in developing, ranging from the personal to the national. Additionally, Singh's body of figurative work frequently draws on the private and public lives of women like herself, and on the external events that act on them. Like these lives, her dense, multilayered canvases defy any single interpretation.multilayered... Arpita Singh's paintings are informed by and address the multiple histories she has witnessed and narratives she has played a part in developing, ranging from the personal to the national. Additionally, Singh's body of figurative work frequently draws on the private and public lives of women like herself, and on the external events that act on them. Like these lives, her dense, multilayered canvases defy any single interpretation.multilayered canvases defy any single interpretation.

Reviewing the New York show in which the present lot was first exhibited, critic Holland Cotter observed that "The psychological and the political merge in paintings by New Delhi artist Arpita Singh. So do everyday life and allegory, expressionism and ornament, historical sources from Bengal folk painting to Marc Chagall, and a formal approach that is at once unassuming and hard-worked, gauche and poised" (The New York Times, October 3, 2003).

In the present lot, Singh uses her vivid palette to comment, from the perspective of her aging female protagonist, on the intensely personal vagaries of time as well as the uncertainty of the future. Painted in 2003, this canvas also extends the idea of violence beyond the personal to the very public communal riots and bloodshed that took place across Gujarat in 2002, deeply affecting the artist. To reflect on this duality, Singh surrounds her nude and vulnerable female subject with a host of funerary images including several aged men and women in black, and wreaths and bouquets of pink flowers. Almost as if the mourners do not communicate the idea of violence explicitly enough, the artist also rains daggers down on the scene, paints a machine-gun in one corner, and a body spilling its entrails out in another.

Locating the present lot in the artist's oeuvre, Ella Datta notes that "As Arpita grew both as an artist and as a person, the reality of the larger world, its history and geography, began invading the play world of her picture space. Her dream-time had to make space for real time which then elided into imagined times of the past and the future. Similarly, the public sphere jostled into her private realm. The contrary pulls gave rise to some iconic paintings…Beginning with the year 2000, as Arpita stepped into a mythic space, the scale of her paintings also changed. She began to do very large works. Arpita also began exploring the dramatic possibilities of the picture space with an increasingly complex cast of characters. She handled colours in her oils with a dazzling virtuosity, juxtaposing pinks, yellows and blues with a startling assurance" ("Of Loss & Recovery", Cobweb: Arpita Singh, Vadehra Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2010, p. 6).

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