Important Notice

Speaking about Arpita Singh's early paintings, the critic Richard Bartholomew noted that the artist's canvases communicated a sense of "…disconcerting familiarity and of quiet which is the hallmark of surrealism…In fact, the paraphernalia of her work - the imagery - is in 'suspense', strung and sprung, as it were, to change pace and sensation at the slightest emotive identification and response from the spectator. All this is reinforced with an... Speaking about Arpita Singh's early paintings, the critic Richard Bartholomew noted that the artist's canvases communicated a sense of "…disconcerting familiarity and of quiet which is the hallmark of surrealism…In fact, the paraphernalia of her work - the imagery - is in 'suspense', strung and sprung, as it were, to change pace and sensation at the slightest emotive identification and response from the spectator. All this is reinforced with an impressive continuity and consistency of theme and imagery" (as quoted in Arpita Singh, Pundole Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1976, not paginated).

In these canvases painted in the early 1970s, Singh used fields of smoothly applied colour and fine lines to create stage-like scenes populated by various domestic elements and characters, ranging from chairs, carpets and potted plants to horses and human figures. These surreal and almost theatrical sets, marked by their ambiguous sense of scale and perspective, conflate interior and exterior, private and public. In the present lot, painted in 1971, neatly arranged rows of bottles and flowers appear to grow from two bright orange carpets, and the images of three kings, picked from a deck of playing cards and firmly planted in the ground, seem to be carrying on a conversation around them.

Largely undecipherable, this motley crew of inanimate articles exists in "…an enchanted world where objects, humans, and vegetation are all imbued with a magical life…Fruits, flowers, boats, and figures all achieve an equal significance in animated manifestations. They dissolve into one another, life metamorphosing into life, creating a magical symbiosis" (Yashodhara Dalmia, "Arpita Singh: Of Mother Goddesses and Women", Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists of India, Marg Publications, Mumbai, 1996, p. 70).

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