Arpita Singh
(1937)
Untitled
“In the paintings of Arpita Singh, the inner space cannot be securely separated from the space of the streets. Arpita extrapolates urban experiences to create a visual noise in her work, drawing upon the excessive and the absurd. Her work is layered with tragic metaphors and her woman protagonists in their bounded domestic space are shown as vulnerable to intrusions and unwanted memories. In solitude, the cacophony of the street is amplified…and...
“In the paintings of Arpita Singh, the inner space cannot be securely separated from the space of the streets. Arpita extrapolates urban experiences to create a visual noise in her work, drawing upon the excessive and the absurd. Her work is layered with tragic metaphors and her woman protagonists in their bounded domestic space are shown as vulnerable to intrusions and unwanted memories. In solitude, the cacophony of the street is amplified…and enters the domestic space. Arpita’s play on the paradox between seclusion and intrusion, the private and the public, fragility and resilience, signifies the urban catastrophe that has now become the metaphor for everyday life” (Roobina Karode and Shukla Sawant, “City Lights, City Limits – Multiple Metaphors in Everyday Urbanism”, Art and Visual Culture in India 1857-2007, Marg Publications, Mumbai, 2009, p. 203).
In the present lot, Singh excavates her subjects from the thick layers of oil paint that she uses to build and decorate her surface. While the private feminine realm and the ideas of human vulnerability and frailty are explicit in her portrayal of an aged and naked woman in the lower right corner, they are diametrically opposed – to the extent of almost being edged out of the frame – by images from other, more public realities. Against a vast blue textured ground, unlike the grey decaying wall that the subject leans on, these images speak of holidays, youth, departures, violence and love.
Connecting Singh’s technique with her themes, fellow artist Nilima Sheikh notes that, “The pleasure and ploy of ornamentation is both celebration and disguise. She scrapes and repaints: inexorably bringing to life, tending, a surface she fears might be dull… Yet more often than not the motifs offered are funerary, about mourning the dead and celebrating dying. About living in spite of dying. About enacting death. In Arpita’s painting is that different from enacting living?” (“Of target-flowers, spinal cords, and (un)veilings”, Memory Jars, Bose Pacia exhibition catalogue, 2003, p. 5)
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Lot
14
of
85
SUMMER AUCTION 2009
10-11 JUNE 2009
Estimate
$100,000 - 125,000
Rs 47,00,000 - 58,75,000
USD payment only.
Why?
ARTWORK DETAILS
Arpita Singh
Untitled
Signed and dated in English (lower right and verso)
1995
Oil on canvas
47.5 x 47.5 in (120.6 x 120.6 cm)
EXHIBITED AND PUBLISHED:
Indian Contemporary Fine Art, Saffronart and Apparao Galleries, Los Angeles, 2001
Category: Painting
Style: Figurative
ARTWORK SIZE:
Height of Figure: 6'