Important Notice

Lot 42

 

Quick Zoom

Over a six-decade career, Arpita Singh has established a singular space for herself among India’s pioneering women artists such as Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, and Nasreen Mohamedi. She is celebrated for her unmistakable style, which intermingles the personal and political, fantasy and reality in richly layered works. The seriousness of her subjects-gender, sexuality, violence, displacement, and modern life-appear at odds with her vibrant... Over a six-decade career, Arpita Singh has established a singular space for herself among India’s pioneering women artists such as Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, and Nasreen Mohamedi. She is celebrated for her unmistakable style, which intermingles the personal and political, fantasy and reality in richly layered works. The seriousness of her subjects-gender, sexuality, violence, displacement, and modern life-appear at odds with her vibrant colour palette and the inclusion of deceptively childlike and whimsical motifs that form a distinctive visual lexicon through which she expresses several complex ideas and emotions in a single composition.

The mid-1980s marked the beginning of a prolific period for Singh when she returned to narrative compositions after briefly exploring abstraction in the decade prior. Her canvases grew in scale, and by the early 1990s she had turned her attention to the female identity with figurative works that explored the complexities of women’s private lives and the external events that affected them. The figures of a girl child and the ageing female body became a recurring motif during this period, as seen in the present lot where a middle-aged woman sits in quiet contemplation cradling a younger doll-sized figure. The relationship between the two figures remains ambiguous but their pose suggests a maternal relation, either of mother and daughter or perhaps an adult woman and her own inner child.

Like many of Singh’s women, the older figure appears like a guide or protector; though vulnerable in her nakedness, she wears a mask-like impassivity, her sagging body suggesting a reflection on the cycles of life and the passage of time. Writes Nilima Sheikh, “She is the large mother holding her golden girl-child in the soft warm pink and blue-brown folds of her flesh as she would have inside her womb cave, tired but indefatigable heir to the legend of the Yama-uba the mountain woman whose account Utamaro illustrated, large, mythic and funny, stepping across history to belong to the middle-class homes of south Delhi. It is and it is not about motherhood. If there is biography in her paintings, it is equally an enquiry into reproductive patterns, genes and inheritance; the overlap engineers intertwining lifecycles. A childhood remembered, imagined, desired, turns round to confront a parent’s death, organs of reproduction come into flower to celebrate one’s own mortality.” (Nilima Sheikh, “Of Target Flowers, Spinal Cords and (Un)veilings”, Nilima Sheikh and Peter Nagy, Arpita Singh: Memory Jars – New Paintings and Watercolours, New York: Bose Pacia, 2003)

Singh’s canvas is richly textured, layered with thick applications of pigment. Her subjects often float freely within a dreamlike space, reminiscent of the surrealist style of artists like Marc Chagall, who greatly influenced her early in her career. The figures in the present lot are partially contained by ornamental borders on either side, a compositional hallmark seen in many of her works. On the right, a series of aeroplanes appear as potential incursions that threaten to imminently disrupt the sanctity of the women’s private lives. The arrangement of these recurring elements, along with the floral border on the left, recalls the patterns found in kantha textiles, traditional to Singh’s native Bengal. This reflects the deep impact her time designing textiles at the Weavers’ Service Centre in the mid-1960s had on the incipience of her artistic style.

Critic Geeta Kapur notes, “...Arpita shows stretched hems which not only have bitten-off floral borders as in old quilts, it is as if the phantasmagoric quilt itself is not large enough. The secret is let out. The edge of the picture reveals a teeming underworld of bodies and objects. It is a grown girl’s coverlet still fresh with her adolescent pleasures, the pigment blooming, the surface cushioned thick with images… As is so frequent in the folk and popular art of Bengal, the pattern and the iconography are open-ended. These quilts had embroidered trains and gun-toting firangi soldiers or any other newfangled commodity the village women had encountered. Likewise, Arpita’s repertoire of planes and cars and guns and sahibs is like her great-grandmothers’ imagination, full of toy-totems that designate wishes and taboos. It is a woman’s world view on the material reality of things that make up the working substance of life.” (Geeta Kapur, “Body as Gesture: Women Artists at Work”, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000, p. 42)

The motifs that Singh uses add both personal and political layers to the narratives she portrays. She seamlessly includes multiple perspectives in her compositions and believes that her art is open to various interpretations, each contingent on the viewer. “All works of art, whether it is a book, a song or a painting, are mirrors. In a way, the artist shows you the mirror and you see yourself in it,” she says. (Artist quoted in Radhika Iyengar, “At 86, Arpita Singh Continues to Feel the Urge to Paint Every Day”, Vogue India, 4 October 2023, online)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site